Topic: Young People’s Book Awards

The Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) was established in 1945 to engage the community with literature for young Australians. Its aim is to celebrate and showcase Australian creators and works with authors, illustrators, publishers and booksellers to foster a love a reading for all children and adults. In 1946 the CBCA first established it annual awards to promote books of high literary and artistic quality and they are now the most influential book awards within Australia for children and young adult books (The Children’s Book Council of Australia, 2022).

Eve Pownall was an Australian historian and author who was an early supporter of the CBCA in New South Wales and helped establish the annual Book of the Year Awards. After her death in 1982 her family initiated the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books in her honour in 1988 and in 1993 this has been included in the annual awards for the CBCA (Reading Time, 2015, para.5). The Eve Pownall Award focuses on books that fall within the non fiction category. The entries have the intention of documenting factual material with considerations given to imaginative presentation, interpretation, and a variation of style. The entries in this group cross all age brackets can be for 0-18 years.

This year there is a diverse range of shortlisted titles that bring awareness to different informational areas. The entries are vastly different from one another, but they all have interpreted and documented factual information in a variety of ways. Still Alive, Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System by Safdar Ahmed is a graphic novel that details personal experiences within the immigration detention system in Villawood NSW. This entry is different in every regard to Sami Bayly’s illustrated encyclopaedia which I reviewed for this topic. Non fiction books can come in all different shapes and sizes but what I like about this specific category is that even though by just comparing these two books they are quite different but they both have something very important to say.

I understand that there is much talk around book awards and how they can at time be seen as a popularity contest for the most well-known author at the time or the one that has been most publicised. But by focusing my attention on one category within these awards to has allowed me to explore the titles more closely. When I was reading about why these titles were selected, I tried to look at them from a collection development viewpoint. Book awards do help guide selection of titles, but I think it is also important for the individual to think about their collection and the community they serve and then chose what is best for them. From my experience working within a junior school for a number of years I know that every book on a shortlist won’t work in every collection, but they do help aide the process of selection.

Word Count: 489

References

Reading Time. (2015). Who was Eve Pownall? http://readingtime.com.au/who-was-eve-pownall/

The Children’s Book Council of Australia. (2022). About the children’s books council of Australia. https://cbca.org.au/about