Features

Bill Manhire and Blyton’s Faraway Tree

Multi-accoladed poet and founder of the creative writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington, Bill Manhire relives the magic of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree, in this essay adapted from a talk given at the 2017 Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival….

The Reckoning: Invisible Heroes and their Legacy

Novelist and playwright Whiti Hereaka is wondering where our Māori heroes were, in the commemoration of WWI. Her upcoming YA novel Legacy, will be released this month, and is based on the Māori experience of WWI. I haven’t been to…

And the winners of the Book Awards are …

Freshly announced at the Awards Ceremony in Wellington, the winners of the 2018 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults are … The Margaret Mahy Book of the Year and the Elsie Locke Award for Non-fiction Aotearoa: the new…

Book Quiz: New Zealand’s Heroes and Heroines

New Zealand’s legends inspire our tamariki to believe that the sky is the limit. How much do you know about these biographies targeted at children and their kiwi connections? Test yourself, share with a friend, and let us know on…

Book Awards: Best First Book Authors Tell All!

How does an author not only get their book published, but get their book shortlisted for the Best First Book award? We asked each of this year’s finalists how they went from unpublished amateur to finalist. Eileen Merriman, finalist for…

From the Lake District to Mangere Island

Kura Rutherford ruminates on how powerfully children’s books can evoke geographies both unknown and familiar, from Beatrix Potter’s Lake District to the isolation of Mangere Island. Sometimes a walk around a lake means walking into a book. When my family…

LGBTQI+ Book List: See Us, Hear Us, Validate Us

Today Emmett Roberts, a consent educator, library studies student, and intern with InsideOUT, reflects on what kinds of books young people in the LGBTIQ+ community – and beyond it – need, and gives us some recommendations to check out, from…

School Librarians of Aotearoa: Senga White

Senga White is the Research and Learning Coordinator at Southland Boys’ High School in Invercargill. She has been a school librarian for over a decade. I absolutely love working in school libraries! This profession has become the perfect intersection of…

The Giselle Clarkson Comic: Number 15

As part of our coverage for this year’s NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, we asked illustrator and major book-lover Giselle Clarkson to undertake the mammoth task of reviewing all five Picture Book Award finalists, with the help…