Inside the Australian and New Zealand book industry

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Introducing the picture book ‘Little Bird’s Day’

Thursday, 22 November 2018
Little Bird’s Day is the first picture book to be published through Magabala Books’ Kestin Indigenous Illustrator Award, teaming artist Johnny Warrkatja Malibirr with renowned author and illustrator Sally Morgan....

Introducing children’s book creator Aaron Blabey

Thursday, 22 November 2018
Aaron Blabey is the creator of the bestselling children’s book series ‘Pig the Pug’ and ‘The Bad Guys’ (Scholastic Australia), which have been sold into numerous territories around the world....

Lester wins Melbourne Prize for Literature

Thursday, 22 November 2018
Children’s author and illustrator Alison Lester has won the Melbourne Prize for Literature, presented every three years to a Victorian author ‘whose body of published work has made an outstanding...

Australian fashion designer to create two picture books for Berbay

Thursday, 22 November 2018
Berbay Publishing has acquired world rights to two picture books by one of Australia’s most celebrated fashion designers Collette Dinnigan. Berbay publishing director Alexandra Yatomi-Clarke said Dinnigan’s ‘fashion collections have...

Rising stars

Thursday, 15 November 2018
Australian debut novelists Kirsten Alexander and Holly Ringland may not be familiar names in international publishing circles yet, but they soon will be. Alexander’s Half Moon Lake has just sold...

Debut novel ‘Half Moon Lake’ sold to US, Canada

Thursday, 15 November 2018
US and Canadian rights to Kirsten Alexander’s debut novel Half Moon Lake (Penguin Random House Australia, January 2019) have been sold to Hachette Book Group’s Grand Central imprint. The novel...

Samuel Wagan Watson wins Patrick White Literary Award

Thursday, 15 November 2018
Poet, essayist, scriptwriter and performer Samuel Wagan Watson has won the Patrick White Literary Award, which is traditionally presented to authors who ‘have made a significant but inadequately recognised contribution...

Book-to-screen

Wednesday, 14 November 2018
Australian producer Bruna Papandrea’s company Made Up Stories—best known for co-producing the TV adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies—has acquired screen rights to Holly Ringland’s bestselling debut novel The...

When the wind changes: Justin D’Ath on ‘47 Degrees’ 

Monday, 12 November 2018
Justin D'Ath's 47 Degrees (Puffin, January) follows 12-year-old Zeelie whose life is forever changed when temperatures soar one summer's day in 2009. Described as 'an extraordinarily fast-paced and visceral story that...

Bestsellers this week 

Monday, 12 November 2018
This week's bestseller chart sees the fifth book in Matthew Reilly's Jack West Jr series The Three Secret Cities (Macmillan) in the top spot, debuting at number one. Meanwhile, book 13...

Melody Trumpet (Gabrielle Tozer, HarperCollins)

Friday, 9 November 2018
Melody’s parents are world-famous musicians (and narcissistic bores) who expect their only daughter to have inherited their incredible talent, but poor Melody can’t play any instruments and sounds like a...

Bestsellers this week 

Monday, 5 November 2018
Two highly anticipated fiction titles top the bestsellers chart this week: the seventh book in Sarah J Maas' 'Throne of Glass' YA series Kingdom of Ash (Bloomsbury) has debuted at number one and Jane...

Fusion (Kate Richards, Hamish Hamilton) 

Thursday, 1 November 2018
Kate Richards burst onto the literary scene in 2013 with her award-winning Madness: A Memoir, which described her decade of living with psychosis. She returns now with her first novel,...

A Season on Earth (Gerald Murnane, Text)

Thursday, 1 November 2018
In 1976 William Heinemann published Gerald Murnane’s second novel, A Lifetime on Clouds. In the book’s originally published two parts, the protagonist Adrian Sherd, a student at a Catholic high...

Written in the stars: Minnie Darke on ‘Star-crossed’ 

Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Minnie Darke’s Star-crossed (Michael Joseph, March) follows an aspiring journalist who begins to tinker with her paper’s astrology section after learning that her crush consults his horoscope whenever he’s faced with making...

Bound together: Kate Richards on ‘Fusion’ 

Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Kate Richards’ Fusion (Hamish Hamilton, February 2019) tells the story of conjoined twins, their carer, and an injured stranger who is brought into their isolated bush home. Reviewer Jacqui Davies described...