Australian Children’s Laureate Press release: Dec 6, 2012

Double the Stories, Double the Fun as Two Champions of Aussie Storytelling Announced as Inaugural Laureates

Much-loved children’s authors Alison Lester and Boori Monty Pryor are being announced today as the first Australian Children’s Laureates at the launch of the initiative in Adelaide.

Both are talented and award-winning storytellers who bring a wealth of experience and creativity to the role – Alison as a renowned author and illustrator, and Boori as a celebrated author, performer, dancer and poet.

This prestigious national honour, the first of its kind in this country, is to be awarded at the launch by the Hon. Grace Portolesi, SA Minister for Education and Child Development and iconic children’s presenter Noni Hazlehurst, and is the culmination of the work by the Australian Children’s Literature Alliance (ACLA) to promote the transformational power of reading, creativity and story in the lives of young Australians.

ACLA Chair Marj Osborne says, “We are delighted to announce Alison and Boori as our joint inaugural Australian Children’s Laureates for 2012 and 2013. In them we found not one but two incredible individuals with the creative and passionate spirit we were looking for, so we made the unusual but exciting decision to appoint both.”

During their appointment Alison and Boori will act as national and international ambassadors for Australian children’s literature and will separately visit every state and territory inspiring young people to tell their own stories.

Click here to read the entire release and click here to see the events planned for Australia’s National Year of Reading 2012.

If you’re making plans to visit another culture with children, here’s a multi-genre multitude of resources, from guides for family travel to a pre-teen’s memoir of moving to Africa. Books, sites, lists… something to inspire and ease your travel with children and enrich their multicultural upbringing in the best possible way: experiencing new territory for themselves. Happy travels!

David Elliot Cohen’s One Year Off: Leaving It All Behind for a Round-the-World Journey With Our Children, in the Traveler’s Tales series, provides an ambitious starting point. Annotated travel-related children’s book lists, organized by country, await you at Travel for Kids. Along with books for young travelers, the Goodlittletraveler website suggests helpful advice about traveling with children. The Pennywhistle Traveling with Kids Book offers vehicular orientation for parents and kids traveling by car, plane, train or boat.

In Alison Lester’s Are We There Yet? 8-year-old Gracie narrates a family vacation all around Australia. Headed to the Caribbean? Here’s a book list. Along with many Fodors guides for kids traveling in Europe and U.S., Madallie: A Children’s Travel Store stocks an around-the-world adventure guide. Exploring Chinatown: A Children’s Guide to Chinese Culture is a great guide to any Chinatown, wherever in the world you’re headed. Four Corners Publishing puts out YA novels for and about young travelers, including guides to Sydney, Mexico, and Israel. In Learning to Swim in Swaziland by Nila K. Leigh, an American 11-year-old describes her life in Africa, where she moved when she was 8.

Introducing young children to international art classics in preparation for travel? Art Up Close makes helpful suggestions. And Bob Raczka’s Where in the World? takes Alighiero e Boetti’s tapestry map of the world as starting point for a world tour of great art–good fun for armchair and hit-the-road young travelers alike.

Adding to our recent website update on illustrators…

Last autumn at Dromkeen, the children’s literature museum in Australia, I saw an exhibit of startlingly accomplished children’s drawings of Antarctica: an artistic collaboration between Australian writer-illustrator Alison Lester and schoolchildren worldwide. During Alison’s Antarctic Arts Fellowship trip to Antarctica in 2005, her Kids Antarctic Art Project began with a diary emailed to the children, who drew pictures of what they imagined from her reports. In a fascinating Australian Antarctic Magazine article, Alison demonstrates the process of adding her own design and color sense to the kids’ drawings, with examples.

Thanks to the internet, this much-loved writer-illustrator is available internationally, 24/7: take a look at these charming and informative excerpts from master classes with kids and from an interview about her creative process.

Purr, Moo, and Roar are Alison’s new series for very young children. Her best-selling book internationally, Imagine, has been translated into 10 languages. An exhibition of original illustrations for her recent and wildly popular Are We There Yet? picture book (about traveling around Australia) is being curated by Books Illustrated. (More on Books Illustrated here.)

Alison’s Antarctica trip has inspired two books so far. Snoopy Sparks Goes South is the journal of a young detective who travels south with her aunt, a bryologist (a moss biologist). She and Coral Tulloch, another former Arts Fellow, are sharing the writing and illustration of One Small Island, The Destruction and Regeneration of Macquarie Island. They plan to finish the book by 2009.