Katrina Nannestad
HarperCollins, $14.99
Katrina Nannestad reckons children deserve to know what it’s like to live in the country.
“Farming families and rural communities are a vital part of our Australian identity,” the Bendigo writer says.
“Yet most children live in cities.”
Katrina has just published the third in her Red Dirt Diary series of books for younger readers.
“Blue’s News” brings back Blue Weston, the feisty lass whose adventures are the focus of the Red Dirt Diaries.
Katrina says she wants to portray the “beauty and joy of life on the land, the hardships that farmers and their families are faced with, and the great way that rural communities work together in both good times and tough times”.
She also wants to make young readers laugh, so Blue gets into some embarrassing scrapes.
Trained as a teacher, Katrina’s first novel, Bungaloo Creek, was published a decade ago.
This new series, which began in 2010, takes Blue to school, at Hardbake Plains, where she starts a newspaper, and struggles to come to terms with a new teacher.
SULARI Gentill has won this year’s Davitt Award, which is run by Sisters in Crime to honour women crime writers. This is an impressive result for the delightful Sulari, who was one of the many highlight authors at the Bendigo Writers Festival last month.
She began her historical crime fiction series featuring the urbane Rowland Sinclair just a couple of year’s ago, and there are now four novels, the most recent, Paving the New Road.
It was for the second in the series, A Decline in Prophets, that she was awarded the Davitt.
THE Children’s Book Council of Australia is restructuring its organisation, replacing the system where the national executive moves each two years from state to state to a new board of management which will oversee all administration. The CBCA awards, however, will continue to be run by branch management committees on a rotational system.
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