Our latest blog posts

Interviews with our work experience students

Over the next few weeks we’re participating in a work experience program with students from high schools across Melbourne. Here, Jenny Liu tells us about her favourite books.

How would you describe your taste in books?

I mostly gravitate towards fantasy books, in particular those with interesting magic and strong lead characters. I also enjoy reading science fiction, survival and historical fiction – I’ll read most genres within fiction really. That being said, I don’t particularly enjoy romance books. I…

Read more ›

Our favourite books of 2015 (so far)

Our staff share the best books they’ve read so far this year, including new releases and older titles just discovered.

Alan Vaarwerk, Editorial Assistant of Readings Monthly:

This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s heard me raving about it for the past six months, but I was so excited to get my hands on Kelly Link’s Get In Trouble, the American writer’s first collection for adults in ten years. The collection’s tightly-written and astonishing short stories…

Read more ›

Announcing the winner of the 2015 Readings Children’s Book Prize

The winner of the Readings Children’s Book Prize 2015 is… Rivertime by Trace Balla!

The Readings Children’s Book Prize recognises and celebrates books that families love reading together, or that children read under the covers with a torch late into the night because they can’t bear to put it down – books they tell their friends about. It also aims to raise the profile of debut and on-the-rise Australian children’s book authors.

Rivertime is a tender and beautifully illustrated tale…

Read more ›

See inside Rivertime by Trace Balla

Congratulations to Trace Balla who was named the winner of this year’s Readings Children’s Book Prize for her debut book, Rivertime. Find out more about Trace Balla’s win here.

See below for a sneak peek at some pages from inside Rivertime.

Image credit: Excerpt from Rivertime by Trace Balla, published by Allen & Unwin.

Find out more about the Readings Children’s Book Prize here.

Read more ›

June highlights in children's and young adult books

by Emily Gale

A word that keeps coming up when we talk about YA is resilience. Melbourne writers Fiona Wood (Wildlife) and Gabrielle Williams (The Guy, The Girl, The Artist and His Ex) spoke very movingly about resilience as a theme of their recent work during a Readings event. Visiting US author Laurie Halse Anderson also used the phrase ‘Resilience Lit’ to describe what she writes (The Impossible Knife of Memory and Wintergirls), as a response to…

Read more ›

What we're reading: Annie Baker, Giulia Enders and Nova Weetman

Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.

Emily Gale is reading Frankie and Joely by Nova Weetman

One of the things that has struck me while observing my children develop is how good they are at making, and keeping, friends. They did not get this from me. I always found friendship tricky to navigate, especially in my early-to-mid teens, and…

Read more ›

Five terrific graphic novels for teens

by Bronte Coates

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

Nemeses! Dragons! Science! Symbolism! Ballister Blackheart is a Super Villain and Nimona is a shapeshifter who’s determined to be his Evil Sidekick. Opposing them is Ballister’s arch-nemeisis and also, former BFF Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin, a Hero who works for the Institution of Law Enforcement and the shadowy (is she evil?) Director.

Nimona is a smartly funny and subversive fantasy epic from Noelle Stevenson (also known as Gingerhaze!). It’s full of diverse, complicated characters with lots…

Read more ›

Interviews with our Readings Children's Book Prize Shortlist 2015

We interviewed all six of the six shortlisted authors for this year’s Readings Children’s Book Prize.

The winner of the Readings Children’s Book Prize will be announced at midday on Tuesday 16 June!

Meet A.L. Tait, author of The Mapmaker Chronicles: Race to the End of the World

What were you like as a kid?

“I think the best word to use would be ‘self-contained’. I was a skinny, freckled, ballet-dancing redhead who loved reading and topped the spelling tests…

Read more ›

The story behind my book

by Klaus Neumann

I became first interested in the history of Australia’s response to refugees and asylum seekers fourteen years ago. What interested me at the time was that a small group of immigrants who had arrived in Australia in the second half of the 1930s were declared ‘enemy aliens’ during the Second World War on account of their nationality, and were then interned. They had come to Australia in search of protection, and were locked up during the war because they could…

Read more ›