Celebrating 80 years of CBCA

This year, and into 2026, the Children’s Book Council of Australia is celebrating 80 years of Australian stories. What a proud and dynamic time this has been for children’s book publishing with some significant highlights shared here.

2025 marks 80 years since CBCA commenced in Australia, with the aim to promote and foster quality literature for children. The first Book of the Year was awarded in 1946, to Leslie Rees’ book Karrawingi the Emu (illustrated by Walter Cunningham and published by John Sands). Nan Chauncy Award winner, Mem Fox (2017) mentions, (in her award speech), about the joy of reading Leslie Rees’ books whilst living in South Africa as a child, and then being able to meet him in person, on her return to Australia as an adult. 

Celebrations will continue into 2026 as we commemorate 80 years of the Awards. In 1946 (and previous years) there were few books being published specifically for children, and it is of note that in 1952 an additional category (Picture Book of the Year) was established; perhaps the awards sparked interest in writing for children. In 1982 the Book of the Year Award was separated into Younger Readers and Older Readers categories. In 1988 the Eve Pownall (non-fiction) and New Illustrator Awards commenced; and finally in 2001 Early Childhood category was first presented. You can view the list of these awards on the CBCA website.

CBCA is also well known for the quality merchandise created each year to support the Children’s Book Week theme: in 2025 we are invited to Book an Adventure! (with artwork by Jess McGeachin). As well as the usual items, you are able to purchase a ‘passport’ for you/your child/your students to record a year of adventures. There will be more merchandise lines added to the website soon – so maybe wait a bit if you intend to buy! If you have not done so already, you can access your free year planner on the home page of the CBCA website.

Each year many schools and public libraries celebrate Children’s Book Week by hosting dress-up days/parades. A wonderful way to bring books to life.

In recent years CBCA has also commenced Shadow Judging of the Book of the Year Awards. Schools register to judge the shortlisted books in one of the categories and based on the same criteria used by the Book of the Year Judges, they nominate the book they deem worthy of the Award. These are now announced at the same time as the Book of the Year Awards. We witnessed at the 2024 Book Week celebration at Government House the depth to which these young people consider their choice.

What is your favourite title that has won a CBCA Award? Ivan Southall’s Ash Road won in 1966. In 1967 I was in Grade 4 at school in Hobart when the Black Tuesday bushfires swept through southern Tasmania on the first day of term. When I came across this book in Grade 6 it took no imagination to identify with the children’s experiences. In my first year as a teacher-librarian, I was thrilled when Ruth Park’s Playing Beattie Bow won. I also recall the excitement when Robin Klein and Emily Rodda suddenly appeared in the short lists in 1983 and 1984.

I look forward to February 25 when the notables are announced and March 25 when the shortlists are announced.

Felicity Sly is Treasurer of CBCA Tasmania, and a recently retired teacher-librarian.

Editor’s note: Thanks Felicity, you have certainly jogged my memories and provided inspiration for the celebrations to come. I too loved Playing Beattie Bow. 

My pick in my first year as a teacher librarian way back in 1984 was Bertie and the Bear by Pamela Allen – a book that still delights today as a read aloud AND, of course, Possum Magic by Mem Fox. This year also heralded the introduction of Penny Pollard in Penny Pollard’s Diary, by Robin Klein. The original cover was perfect!!!!

Are you a reader?

Happy new year to all our readers, and welcome back to another year of the CBCA Tas blog. Thanks to Maureen Mann for starting the year with a challenge to examine our own reading commitment.

As this new year begins, my social media seems to have been filled with book related items. Many of them I ignored, but every so often something piqued my interest. Are you a reader of books or listener of audiobooks? 

We all read every day but it’s frequently not sustained reading. Our reading ranges from the incidental of signs and notices in our everyday lives. It includes the time, (and for so many) it’s probably too long, on social media. Or all the reading we do within our working days, while looking at screens. 

But reading a book or listening to an audiobook requires us to concentrate for a much longer period. So, this time I am focussing on some of the things I have found, hoping to inspire the less frequent readers among you to do more.

100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul, published 2021. The title intrigued me and so I thought of some of the things I have lost. These include: the excitement of seeing photos just back from the developer; hard copy newspapers every day; not making eye contact with people outside: everyone is glued to their device; maps and atlases for serendipitous travelling. 

A review by Kate W in booksaremyfavouriteandbest lists them all with her comments. What have you lost? 

 

66 days to learn to love reading again, an article published in the online Guardian newspaper, by the Australian journalist Doosie Morris (8 January, 2025), encourages those who have lost the mojo for reading in a sustained way. She says that all one needs is just under 10 weeks to change your habits. 

The CBCA Tas Facebook page reposted Mike Lucas’s Book Week poem, celebrating 80 years of the CBCA Book of the Year Awards. It’s the first I have seen of many which will celebrate this year’s milestone. 

Brisbane Libraries are encouraging children to register to create their own library display. Each month someone is chosen as Kid Librarian. What a fantastic idea. Wish I had thought of it while I was still working. What theme would you choose to highlight, even though you’re probably not a kid librarian?

Libraries Tasmania recently released the most popular books of 2024, over several categories, and for physical as well as eLibrary items. Does this kind of list help you in your reading journey? If you haven’t already seen it, have a look here. 

Do you have a new year reading goal? Is your aim to read more than you did last year? Or expand your reading beyond your normal choices? 

And finally, a few books which I have enjoyed recently.

Maureen Mann
Retired teacher librarian and avid reader

The Bookmarked Life: Saving a Place for Reading

The final post for 2024 is a thought-provoking piece from regular contributor, Lyndon Riggall, highlights the importance of regular sustained reading. Lyndon provides a compelling impetuous to set some goals for personal reading practices and to encourage the youngsters in our lives to build healthy and sustained reading habits.

 

In a recent article that has been doing the rounds online, titled simply The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, Rose Horowitch (2024) outlines an ongoing crisis in higher education: even in top-tier university English Departments, students are arriving not only unprepared for a standard reading load of a book a week, but also sometimes having never read a full-length novel from cover-to-cover at all. She notes: “In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.” Horowitch points to an EdWeek Research Center Survey by Stephen Sawchuk (2024) of third-to-eighth-grade educators in which only 17 percent said that they “primarily teach whole texts.” The knock-on effect of this is that students reach a point where even a short novel can feel like an insurmountable hurdle in a world of rapid-fire information dispensed in bright, bite-sized chunks. When I was a primary school student, my Grade 6 teacher called the first half an hour or so after lunch “SQUIRT”: “Sustained, Quiet, Uninterrupted, Individual Reading Time.” What a privilege that feels like in 2024… perhaps even an impossibility.

 

As the Department for Education, Children and Young People here in Tasmania continues its focus on literacy and reading across the school years, I had the fortune to attend a recent full-day workshop with reading expert Emina McLean, who discussed the science of reading with an eye to the specific strategies that are most effective in developing this skill. At the heart of her work is the skill of fluency: being able to read a text out loud, clearly, accurately and with expression. There is certainly no denying that the complex processes of unpacking words, tone and meaning are neither easy nor simple, but if we can achieve them—and even sustain them—then certainty of our reading level follows. It starts early, and, if we are successful, that journey that never ends, and whole texts are a large part of it.

Earlier this week I saw a TikTok video making fun of the typical middle-school literary canon of books and their absurd titles like Biffs, Barfs and my Big Brother’s Farts, The Too-Cool-For-School Ultimate Guide to Pranks or Don’t Read This Unless You Want to be Scared! While I have concerns about what it means for the state of publishing that there are so many books that are easily marketable, in general I’m a supporter of the idea that almost all reading is good reading. Ideas, certainly, can be dangerous, but I’ve never been particularly afraid of heavily franchised books like those connected to the films of Disney or videogames like Minecraft. As we grow up, all stories qualify as lessons in the power of writing for good and evil. And if what we read makes us laugh, or makes us afraid, or makes us blush, why should there be any shame in enjoying a narrative for what it is?

It is unfathomable to me that we might live in a world where an English Major at any university cannot read a novel. Reading, in my experience, is the gateway to all of the ideas of the world, but the progress of Tasmania’s dreams of literacy will never be possible without a focus on the skill of sustained focus. Listening recently on Radio National to an interview with American psychologist Jonathan Haidt, I was struck by his overwhelming enthusiasm for the government’s recent announcement of a social media ban for young people under the age of sixteen. I have had my concerns about the ban (primarily due to its potential to push the online behaviour of children away from their family’s notice and into private spaces on the fringes), but it seems hard to argue that social media isn’t dangerous when most of the adults that I’ve spoken to feel that their own ability to focus has been significantly diminished—at least in some part—by it. 

Whenever I look at the “Screen Time” section of my iPhone, I find myself baffled by the fact that I can so easily use my device for three hours a day or more while barely noticing. An hour reading some fiction before bed in comparison to an hour spent scrolling social media can make me feel like an entirely different person in the morning, and I have to remind myself of this regularly, yet I was born before the era of the smartphone. How can we possibly imagine what life could be like with less addiction to technology if we have never seen it?

As we head towards Christmas and the summer holidays, now seems like as good a time as any to think about how we spend those precious snatches of free time. The “Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” are the evolution of “The Children Who Don’t Read Books.” For all of our strategies, there is nothing to my mind that will be more effective to building fluency, understanding and knowledge than simply reading—as actively, widely and frequently as possible. 

 

Margaret Atwood once said that “a word after a word after a word is power.” What a gift to be able to harness that power, and what a tragedy when we can’t.

 

It’s a huge mission, but with a simple beginning: 

 

The first turn of a page…

 

 

Lyndon Riggall

Lyndon Riggall is a writer, teacher, and co-president of the Tamar Valley Writers Festival. He has written the picture books Becoming Ellie and Tamar the Thief, and is a 2024 Premier’s Reading Challenge Reading Champion. You can find out more about him at www.lyndonriggall.com or on social media @lyndonriggall. 

New Books for Summer Reading

What’s new and popular in YA and children’s reading this year? This week Bronwyn, from the Hobart Bookshop, introduces some great titles to hook readers of all ages. There might be something here for the Christmas stocking!

Looking back on 2024, there have been many highlights in children’s fiction, including new releases from favourite authors who have returned to capture the imaginations of new readers.

Philip Reeve wrote the first book in the Mortal Engines series in 2001, with the fourth book in the main quartet, A Darkling Plain, released in 2006. While there have been subsequent releases since, the brand-new Thunder City marks a return to the same world as the first Mortal Engines book. Revisiting a series after such a long break can be challenging, as the original audience for these books are no longer children. Reeve hopes to attract a new audience by introducing an entirely new cast of characters. The book has only just been released in Australia, so we eagerly wait to see if it will captivate readers as the original did.

Emily Rodda, beloved for her Rowan of Rin and Deltora Quest series, has returned with an epic simultaneous three-book release. This is an unusual move, as none of the books are available individually. The Landovel series is beautifully presented as a box set—a bold commitment that only an author who has already captured the hearts of many readers could undertake.

Another emerging trend that many may have noticed is the growing abundance of YA books about murder and mystery. Thanks to the popularity of series by Holly Jackson and Karen McManus, and spurred on by the way YA readers use TikTok to discover books, the number of titles in this space has grown significantly. These books vary greatly in tone and depth, but they often succeed in holding the attention of readers who might not otherwise immerse themselves in a book. Speaking with readers of this genre reveals a common thread: the need to know how the story ends.

The murder-mystery genre also allows YA readers to examine human motivations, fostering an understanding that people don’t always act as they should—a key part of adolescent development. These aren’t the only books exploring the human condition; character diversity is also increasing. Traditionally marginalised characters are being more frequently placed at the centre of stories rather than relegated to the sidelines.

Some standout recent examples include Thunderhead by Sophie Beer, where the protagonist shares the same disability as the author, lending the story a palpable resonance and authenticity. Maggie O’Farrell, the award-winning author of Hamnet, has written a children’s picture book, When the Stammer Came to Stay, featuring a character who begins to struggle with speech—a challenge the author herself experienced. Both of these books offer profound understanding and empathy, making them powerful additions to children’s literature.

Bronwyn Chalke
The Hobart Bookshop

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Join the revolution! Giving every child good books

Nella Pickup recently attended the 39^th IBBY International Congress in Trieste Italy  with its theme to Join the revolution! Giving every child good books. Participating with over 630 delegates from 60 different countries Nella shares some key highlights to capture what she describes as “an awe filled experience.”   This global perspective provides inspiration and affirmation for our own commitment to children, books and reading.

Highlights

An exhibition celebrating the life and work of Jella Lepman, created by artists from different countries and cultural backgrounds.

Michael Rosen's opening address: Literature as the driver for change.

Robert Piumini’s definition of poetry (supplied by children) 

• Poems are words which love each other.
• Poems are words which help the world not to fight with weapons.

Hearing Irene Vasco, joint winner of the IBBY-iRead Outstanding Reading Promoter Award talk about her fear when dealing with people like Pablo Escovar, and young disenfranchised guerrillas in the Columbian jungles, teaching them Spanish, the language of their oppressors, so they were able to participate in civil life, in the peace process and regain some of their human rights; and the profound sacred and cultural importance of keeping their own languages alive.

Marie Aubinais (ATD Fourth World’s Libraries) IBBY – Asahi Reading Promotion Award 9% of the French population is illiterate. The people in poverty who attend the street libraries give feedback which informs the project – dignity not handouts.

Villaggio per Crescere - a 20-year long project which has seen a decrease from 1 in 20 mothers to 1 in 2 mothers who read to their children. - what a fantastic outcome!

Australian contingent with Monica (2nd left)

Monica Munizaga, from Chile, talked about the Embroidery that thrills project used for people with visual disabilities to read through music, poetry and rhythm. The pieces are made by local villagers (many of whom are illiterate) who take the main bits of a story and embroider it - using various techniques for use by the visually impaired in their community.

Once Upon a border. Stories to imagine a world without frontiers – Mohamed Ba and Deborah Soria. What if the true purpose of borders is not to stop people but to keep their stories from coming out. With 117.3 million refugees worldwide, we should be asking not “what do you need” but “who are you and what is your story”.

IBBY colleague Margot Lindgren has written a comprehensive blog post about the conference that is well worth the read.

Nella Pickup

Reader, grandparent, member of IBBY Australia Inc. and CBCA Tas.

Australian delegates stand with a statue of James Joyce 
prior to the conference.

Editor's note: A timely post to remind us that improving literacy and reading are global issues. The work of IBBY helps us see the broader perspective. Consider joining IBBY Australia to be a part of this world wide community.

What are teenage boys reading for pleasure? Insights from a school library.

Hooking male teenagers into reading can be challenging, and one reason these teen readers from The Hutchins School have identified, is finding books that they can relate to and spark their interest. Read on for some insights and excellent suggestions.

In today’s world of digital distractions and packed schedules, reading for pleasure among teens is noticeably declining. It is well documented that the benefit of reading improves academic achievement, develops empathy and social skills, and supports mental well-being. Yet, these advantages are increasingly overshadowed by barriers that limit teens’ reading habits.

Teens themselves identify a variety of reasons for not reading:

• Time constraints: Busy schedules packed with homework, sports, and social activities leave little room for reading.
• Preference for other leisure activities: Many teens prefer digital entertainment over picking up a book.
• A lack of access to relatable books: Stories that reflect their experiences and interests can be hard to find.
• Difficulty maintaining focus: Fast-paced, screen-based entertainment makes sustained reading feel more challenging.

Adding to this, the publishing industry struggles with effectively reaching the teenage boy demographic. The decline in teens' reading for pleasure and the limited availability of books published for boys are interconnected challenges.

One key issue is the lack of clear categorisation in the market. Books for teens aged 12–14 are often placed in the YA category, which targets readers aged 12–18 but tends to feature more mature content better suited to older teens. 

Currently, YA literature is noticeably leaning toward a female readership, creating a gap in addressing the needs of boys in this age group. Publishing decisions have complicated this further by encouraging authors to age their protagonists up or down to fit into existing categories, leaving teen boys with fewer books that resonate with them.

What’s trending in our school library? A closer look at our students’ favourite reads

Rangers Apprentice – The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan 

“I enjoy the Ranger's Apprentice series because it’s full of adventure! I've read all the books in the series, and now I’m going back to The Ruins of Gorlan. The main character Will starts off unsure of himself but becomes stronger and more courageous as the story goes on. I also really liked his friendship with Horace; they have each other’s backs through everything. Plus it's an exciting read with plenty of action and humour along the way.” – Jack, 13yrs

 

Cop and Robber by Tristian Bancks

“I was drawn to this book because Nash's dad is a criminal and his mum is a cop— wow! What an unusual family situation! Nash struggled between right and wrong, and I was interested to see the decisions he would make. The story was fast-paced and intense, with a few funny moments. I also really enjoyed that it was set in Australia.” – Stuart 13yrs

 

The Lorikeet Tree by Paul Jennings

“I chose this book because I like reading stories with an environmental message. It wasn’t what I expected but I enjoyed it. The story is about twins Emily and Alex, who receive heartbreaking news about their dad. The twins don’t really get on. As a way of coping, Alex retreats to the treehouse and keeps building. This is an emotional story that deals with relationships, feelings, and the environment.” –  Tim 14yrs.

 

Wonderscape by Jennifer Bell

“I liked that this book is set in a virtual world where the characters must solve puzzles and problems to progress through different realms. The characters—Arthur, Ren, and Cecily—are all very different, and they use their differences to work together as a team to overcome challenges. This fast-paced science fiction read is not only fun but also has an interesting plot that keeps you reading.” – George 13yrs.

Malamander by Thomas Taylor

“Malamander is set in the spooky town of Eerie-on-Sea, where Herbie and his friend Violet work together to solve the mystery of Violet’s missing parents and their connection to the legendary Malamander. The story is packed with mystery and adventure, featuring castaways, cameralunas, and even an evil author! I loved the creepy vibe of the town. The story moves fast, and there are plenty of funny moments too.” – Alex 13yrs.

Supporting Teen Boys’ Reading Journey

Teens need access to books that reflect their diverse interests and experiences. It is important that the publishing industry broadens its focus to offer a wider range of stories that resonate with all teens, ensuring that boys see themselves represented in the books they read. School libraries, supported by teacher-librarians and qualified library staff, play a key role in this process. By providing well-curated collections, offering personalised book recommendations, and creating welcoming spaces for exploration, libraries can foster an interest in reading among teen boys and help them find stories that they truly connect with.

Michelle Davies
The Hutchins School

Editor's note: A recent article in The Bookseller explores the challenges of publishing books for the teen book market. Can you add to this list of great books for our teen male readers? Some I have enjoyed targetting the mid teen market and that have both male and female lead characters are: Amie Kaufman's The Isles of the Gods #1 and Leanne Yong's Two Can Play that Game, Grace Notes by Karen Comer and The Q by Amy Tintera. Note the cover designs - how well do they 'speak' to potential male readers?