Chief Minister's Reading Challenge Ambassadors
Jack Heath
Jack Heath is the bestselling author of thirty-seven exciting books for young people and adults. He started writing his first novel, The Lab, at age 13 and earned a publishing contract at 18. His Minutes of Danger series has been translated into several languages and adapted for film. His new book is Kid President Totally Rules?
Reading hasn't just given me a career. It's changed the way my brain works. Every word I learn gives me a more sophisticated understanding of the world around me. Each book I read gives my imagination a workout, helping me think more creatively in everyday life. It teaches me to focus and to relax. Reading gives me sensations - smell, taste, temperature and more - that I just can't get from a TV show or a video game. And more than all that, reading has taught me that it's possible to create a spectacular work of art without several million dollars worth of equipment. All you need is the ideas in your head and a pen in your hand.
Tania McCartney
Tania McCartney is an award-winning author/illustrator and the founder of the respected Kids' Book Review and The Happy Book podcast. She has been writing professionally for over 35 years, specialising in magazines and children’s publishing, editing, layout and design. Tania has over 60 books in print or production, published in more than 20 countries. Her most recent books include the Plume picture book series, Fauna, Dorrie, Australia’s Wild Weird Wonderful Weather and Wildlife Compendium of the World. Award nods and shortlistings include the World Illustration Awards, Museums Australasia Multimedia & Publication Design Awards and the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. When she's not creating books, you'll find Tania reading, travelling, sipping coffee or championing juvenile literacy.
Books are extraordinary things. They may be comprised of ink and paper but once opened wide, entire worlds tumble out. Books enchant, enlighten and educate. They befriend and support. They take readers on a journey. And they have the potential to change children’s lives.
For kids, reading brings colour and vigour. It builds self-confidence, competence and intelligence. It fosters hope, delight and creativity, and hones aptitude, imagination and independence. Story links directly to emotional development, greater social skills and broader general knowledge. It can make kids more articulate, develops higher order reasoning, and promotes critical thinking. It brings an internal sense of freedom that only fluent readers can ever know.
When I write books for kids, my aim is to entertain first, educate second. Entertaining books help children fall in love with story, and this makes reading a joy not a chore. When we can align books with joy, love, pleasure, excitement, laughter - we create a deep love of books that hones literacy skill by association (and the learning is an added bonus!).
For me, books and story and writing and reading is everything. As a child, story enchanted me. Like many of my age, I adored books by Dr Seuss, Enid Blyton and Richard Scarry, and nowadays, I have a picture book obsession that's borderline psychotic. But it doesn’t matter what we read, so long as we give ourselves and our kids the gift of story.
Go on. Open up a book and dive in. Enter other worlds. I dare you.
Stephanie Owen Reeder
Dr Stephanie Owen Reeder is an award-winning author, illustrator, editor and book reviewer. Her children’s picture books include: I’ve Got a Feeling! (IBBY Outstanding Book 2011); Trouble in the Surf, illustrated by Briony Stewart (CBCA Notable Book 2020); Australia’s Wild Weird Wonderful Weather, illustrated by Tania McCartney (CBCA Notable Book 2021 and winner of the MAPDA Book Design and Publishing Award 2021; Ghostie, illustrated by Mel Armstrong; Swifty: The Superfast Parrot, illustrated by Astred Hicks; and her latest title Sensational Australian Animals, illustrated by Cher Hart. Stephanie’s Heritage Heroes series of historical novels includes Amazing Grace: An Adventure at Sea (Winner, NSW Premier’s Young People’s History Prize 2012) and Lennie the Legend: Solo to Sydney by Pony (Winner, Eve Pownall Award for Information Books, CBCA Book of the Year Awards 2016), which is currently being made into a feature film. All five Heritage Heroes books, plus two new stories, have recently been released in Courageous Kids and Their Amazing Adventures, illustrated by Liz Duthie.
Books have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was little, my dad read us children’s classics like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Wind in the Willows. I still have the copy of Alice that my grandmother gave me for my seventh birthday, complete with difficult words underlined in pencil so I could look them up in the dictionary later.
I wrote and illustrated a ‘book’ of poems about my pets when I was seven and penned my first historical ‘novel’ when I was 12. So, not surprisingly, as an adult I’ve always worked with words - as an English teacher, a librarian at the National Library of Australia, a Hansard Editor at Federal Parliament, a book reviewer for The Canberra Times, a university lecturer in children’s literature, and now as a full-time author.
I’ve passed my passion for books on to my children and grandchildren. We’re a proud family of bibliophiles, and my three grandkids often inspire my stories!
http://www.stephanieowenreeder.com
Harry Laing
Harry Laing is a children’s author, poet and comic performer. RapperBee is his most recent book for children (6-12) and it’s a bumper crop of Harry’s poetry with brilliant black and white illustrations by Anne Ryan. MoonFish, his second collection, is a poetry picture book featuring art by some of Australia’s best known illustrators and Shoctopus, his first book is still very much in demand. She is currently the chair of MARION, a centre dedicated to elevating writers and their art, and sits on the Minister's Creative Council.
I don’t know what I’d do without books. And because I’m a poet (and performer) I particularly love writing books of poems for kids. I love turbocharging words and blending all the different flavours: funny, strange, exciting, weird, rap, chant and song. And poems are so cool to perform. Plus, I bring my larger than life characters, Shoctopus, MoonFish and RapperBee, into schools and then we really can have fun.
Emma Batchelor
Emma Batchelor is a writer and author from Canberra. From 2016-2019 she edited and wrote for online publication Leiden, and in 2017 published Building a Conscious Wardrobe (and other fun things) a book championing conscious consumerism. In May, 2021, her first novel, ‘Now that I see you’ won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award. She is currently the chair of MARION, a centre dedicated to elevating writers and their art, and sits on the Minister's Creative Council.
I have always been an avid reader. I treasure memories of my parents reading to me as a small child and the thrill of learning to read on my own. Of the joyful discovery of a new book and the comfort of re-reading a favourite story. Of learning to write and share stories of my own.
I am a naturally shy person, and reading remains an important way for me to learn more about myself and the world around me. It helps me to connect with others, to understand and empathise with experiences different to my own. It is a joy, a pleasure, an escape.
I am excited to be able to talk about a love of books and creating them with younger readers and writers.
Emma Grey
Emma Grey is the multi-published author of five books, including two teen novels. She wrote Unrequited: Boy band meets girl for her then 14-year-old daughter who hated reading but loved Harry Styles. The sequel, Tilly Maguire and the Royal Wedding Mess, features an anxiety-ridden eighteen-year-old whose gap year job in London goes seriously awry.
Along with her school-friend – ARIA-winning composer, Sally Whitwell – Emma co-wrote two musicals based on her teen novels. Deadpan Anti-Fan (based on Unrequited) was selected for the Home Grown Grass Roots development opportunity in Melbourne, and Broadway Unplugged, in Sydney. Before COVID slowed its trajectory, the show was performed to rave reviews at St Clare’s College, with another Canberra school planning to stage the musical soon.
Emma’s published books span the genres of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Her fifth book, a contemporary romantic comedy, some of which is loosely based on her experiences as a midlife widow, was released by Penguin Random House in 2023 and will be published by Zibby Books in the US.
Stories mean the world to me. I had my first go at writing a novel one summer in the 80s. I was fourteen and staying at my grandmother’s house in Bangalow, near Byron Bay, over Christmas. It was all hand-written, back then, heavily influenced by Anne of Green Gables and embarrassingly awful, now I look back on it. But the quality didn’t matter. All that mattered was being carried away by the dream to write.
Several decades, a lot of bad first drafts and five published books later, my first attempt at any new story is still a mess. I try to remember Shannon Hale’s advice that in a first draft all you’re doing is shovelling sand into a pit. Once some words are in the pit, you can start building castles.
Every book we read first started out in that 'sand pit'. I love that authors have lovingly crafted castles for us, and let us see so far inside their imaginations. Something about reading that I’ve loved in the last couple of years is the rise in audiobooks. I don’t think it matters how you absorb words. Reading or listening, the important thing is that a story is able to take you away, make you see things from another perspective and lift you out of reality for a little while.