Join me, Anne Phelan and Marion Halligan at the Wheeler Centre tomorrow night as we talk about the life and works of Ruth Park.

6:15pm at the Wheeler Centre.

Bookings and more info.

Here’s a conversation I’ve had a couple of times.

Person: Something something Miles Franklin Prize something Peter Carey.

Lili: Meh.

Person: So who do you think is Australia’s finest writer, then?

Lili: It’s a tie between Margo Lanagan and Ursula Dubosarsky.

Person: No, I meant literary writer.

Lili: It’s a tie between Margo Lanagan and Ursula Dubosarsky.
It’s true. I think these two women are Australia’s finest writers. Not finest YA writers. Finest of them all.

The Golden Day is about eleven schoolgirls who, in 1967, are taken on an unauthorised excursion by their teacher, Miss Renshaw. They meet up with a charismatic gardener/poet, who takes them to see some Aboriginal paintings in the hidden caves of Sydney Harbour. Or does he? The girls return to school without Miss Renshaw, prompting panic – scandal – talk of murder. This book is Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Getting of Wisdom and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It is Charles Blackman’s ‘Floating Schoolgirl‘. Like The Red Shoe and Abyssinia, The Golden Day wraps you up in a kind of warm, yellow-tinted floaty dreaminess. Like a dream, you don’t feel like you (or anyone) is entirely in control of what they say and do. Like a dream, you watch the world slip by with a kind of golden fuzzy calm. Like a dream, you could tumble into a nightmare at any moment.

If you’ve read White Time, Black Juice or Red Spikes, you don’t need to read on. Yellowcake is more Margo Lanagan awesomeness. There is nobody who can write a short story the way Margo can – nobody who can wrap you up in a whole new world and make you feel like you’ve known these characters, their rhythms of speech, their secret dreams, their homes and families and daily routines – all in twenty pages. Whether it’s the unique fairytale reimaginings of ”The Golden Shroud,” “Night of the Firstlings,” or “Ferryman”; the fierce humanity of “Into the Clouds on High” or “The Point of Roses”; the postapocalyptic ganglands of “Heads”; or the almost postmodern “Eyelids of Dawn” - every one of the ten stories immerses you in unique worlds that are often grim, but always filled with a kind of savage, redemptive joy.

What marvellous blogging intentions I had last month. I was going to talk about:

-Reading Matters, and how wonderful it was to finally attend without running around like a crazy person trying to make sure everything went smoothly.

-books I’ve read and loved this month (I’m still gonna do this – I promise!)

-that whole WSJ/ #yasaves thing

-the Woodend Winter Arts Festival, at which I had a lovely time

-the Voices on the Coast Festival, at which I also had a lovely time

-Pocketful of Eyes, and how it’s out and getting great reviews and you should all go and buy read it.

-a million other things

But it turns out that three conferences/festivals plus PhD + new book out + meetings about NEXT book + one million other things + a nasty cold = not so much free time.

Sorry. I will make it up to you by warning you that a bear is stealing your bicycle – hurry!

Hurrah! Bee and Toby and that stuffed tiger are released into the world! Tomorrow I shall post an Excerpt.

When a dead body is discovered at the Museum, Beatrice May Ross is determined to use her sleuthing skills to solve the case. Sharp, sassy YA crime-fiction, with a dash of romance and a splash of funny.

Bee is in her element working in the taxidermy department at the Museum of Natural History, but her summer job turns out to be full of surprises:
A dead body in the Red Rotunda. A mysterious Museum benefactor. A large stuffed tiger in the Catacombs. A handsome boy with a fascination for unusual animal mating habits.

And a pocketful of glass eyes.

Can Bee sift through the clues to discover whether her mentor reallycommitted suicide … or is there a murderer in their midst?

‘Smart, slick, funny, with sharp edges. Lili Wilkinson is like a coolgeekgirl Agatha Christie.’ – Simmone Howell, author of Everything’s Beautiful

‘Wry, sly, funny, smart, and very entertaining.’ – Jaclyn Moriarty, author ofFeeling Sorry for Celia

A very nice review from Bookseller & Publisher

Buy the paper version

Buy the ebook

I turned thirty yesterday.

It was a lovely day, full of sunshine and friends and food. And I get quite sentimental, saying goodbye to my twenties. It was a big decade for me, but on the other hand I feel like it’s gone in a bit of a circle. Ten years ago I was at Uni, in a long-term relationship, living in the 3068 postcode and watching The West Wing.

Now I’m at Uni (but doing a PhD), in a long-term relationship (with a different [and more wonderful] person), living in the 3068 postcode (different house) and watching The West Wing (streamed from our media server to my iPad).

On the other hand, ten years ago I had no idea what I wanted to do – thought it was something in the film industry (WRONG). Now I’m an author with six books, published in seven countries. I just left an amazing job in order to write and study full time. I feel unbelievably lucky to do what I get to do every day, and do have such wonderful friends, family and partner. I hope things don’t change too much in the next decade, because I’m pretty happy with the way things are.

So, I’ve been a hypocrite.

I have spent so many words and hours and pages trying to convince people that YA literature is just as valid and literary and worthy as all the other kinds of literature. I’ve also said the same thing about fantasy and science fiction. I’ve lambasted the literary snobs who roll their eyes and say “I just don’t do fantasy”, or “even though it’s a children’s book, it’s quite good”.

I’ve gone on and on about Pink Books in YA – about how a sparkly pink cover doesn’t necessarily mean that the words inside don’t contain big ideas worthy of discussion.

But I’d never read romance fiction.

(For adults, I mean. I read heaps of YA romance. And not including Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer because they get to wear a more Acceptably Literary hat because they’re both dead.)

I looked at all those book covers with horrid covers and swirly fonts and titles like The Shiek’s Revenge, and Lady in Black, and I thought – these books are obviously as rubbish as their covers.

And then I was on a panel at the Wheeler Centre about romance fiction, which came with the realisation that I write romance. I mean, I write lots of things, but the last three books I’ve written definitely have one foot in the romcom genre.
So I turned to Justine Larbalestier, who towed me to Kinokuniya and loaded me up with titles. Because the thing with romance (like, let’s face it, the thing with all kinds of fiction but especially genre fiction), is that a lot of it isn’t the kind of thing I want to read. I don’t want to read about girls getting borderline-raped and then falling in love with their pirate captor. I want to read books about the same kinds of girls/women that I write about – smart, funny, flawed people who want to fall in love but aren’t defined by that.

And you know what?

Some romance fiction is awesome. I’m enjoying Julia Quinn and Jennifer Crusie at the moment, and have had Julia Jones and Kristin Higgins recommended. Because I’m spending so much time reading for Uni at the moment, it’s delightful to unwind with funny, reasonably lighthearted books featuring sassy, intelligent women.

I think people read romance for similar reasons to why adults read YA. There is an immediacy and lack of pretension – books that are easy to read but not patronising. There are strong female characters (which, let’s face it, isn’t something that is always found in “literary” fiction). Romance fiction is like comfort food. You know the two main characters are going to end up together. You’re not going to have your heart torn out at the end because one of them develops a fatal disease. You can relax and enjoy the journey of discovering exactly how they end up together.

They’re also novels of personal development. Laurie Hutzler talks about romance narratives involving the “exchange of gifts” – where two people are better together than they are separately, because of the different characteristics they bring to a relationship. As I’ve said before, the subject of love is universal, and one that everyone has a vested interested in.

So this is me, eating humble pie. It’s delicious.

I discovered Diana Wynne Jones in the same library I discovered Lloyd Alexander, when I was about eight. I picked up a book called Fire and Hemlock, and it stuck so firmly in my mind that it’s never got out again, even though I spent many years away from it. I’d never read anything like it before (and never have since).

Around the same time my parents bought me Black Maria for my birthday, and someone else gave me a copy of The Power of Three. I found a battered Charmed Life at a school fete, and borrowed Dogsbody and The Magicians of Caprona from the library.

Nobody writes magic like Diana Wynne Jones. There’s something about the way magic springs so effortlessly from the ordinary, humdrum world, that makes everything magical.

I kept borrowing Fire and Hemlock, over and over again, until suddenly I had no access to that particular library any more. My supply dried up, and although I looked eagerly in every library and second hand bookshop I encountered, I found nothing. I felt a bit like Polly at the beginning of the book, wondering if the story had indeed been as magical as I remembered.

Then, in 2000, I started working in a book shop. And I did my usual Diana Wynne Jones catalogue check, and discovered… reprints. Fire and Hemlock had been reprinted. I ordered it.

It was that magical. It was better than I remembered.

I ordered the others. I ordered them all. I discovered AbeBooks and ordered all the ones that were out of print. Over the next few years, I read every book Diana had ever published. But more kept coming! Nearly every year, and even though Diana was growing old, and her health was failing, still the books kept coming. And there was not a dud among them.

But no more. Thankfully, I have a book shelf full of Diana that I can turn to whenever I wish.

I can’t begin to explain the kind of influence that Diana Wynne Jones had on me. She made me want to be a writer. She makes me want to be a better writer. The character of Thomas Behr in Scatterheart is an homage to Tom Lynn in Fire and Hemlock – a kind of fan-fiction, I suppose, because I loved Diana’s character so much, I wanted to spend more time with him.

Of course I’m not the only one. There are a lot of writers and readers out there mourning the loss of one of the best fantasy authors of our time – the best, in my opinion.

Goodbye, Diana. Thank you for every single word.

For my PhD, I’m looking at YA novels that are political. And by political, I don’t mean where a parent or school or other authority figure is a metaphor for the state, or where political issues are played out in microcosms of school or church. I mean books where teenagers actually engage with real-world politics and politicians. Can you help me out with some titles? I’m particularly interested in recent books, and real-world books (not fantasy, but I am including a couple of dystopic examples). Here’s my list so far:

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow

Uglies, Scott Westerfeld

Vote for Larry, Janet Tashjian

Feed, MT Anderson

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

Wide Awake, David Levithan

Ready or Not, Meg Cabot

Genesis, Bernard Beckett

I’m aware that the giant gaping hole in my list is an Australian title. But I genuinely can’t think of one. There are a few candidates from the 1980s (Obernewtyn, Scatterlings, Taronga, the Pagan series and even maybe People Might Hear You), but I just can’t find anything recent. The closest is John Marsden’s Tomorrow series, except the series is explicitly apolitical (one of the reasons why I’m not a massive fan).

So help me out, Internet! Give me some good political YA titles.

I don’t really know what to say about this, but I want to say something.

The news from Japan makes me very sad. I spent six months in Tokyo teaching English in 2002, and I loved it. It breaks my heart to think that some of the places I visited just aren’t there anymore. I’ve heard from the few friends I have living in Japan, and they’re okay, as are all the bloggers I follow. I confess that when I learnt Maru was okay I actually burst into tears.

I’ve seen the #prayforjapan hashtag around a lot on Twitter, and to be honest it makes me a bit uncomfortable, because I can’t help unpack it and read that some religious groups think that their access to their God is somehow going to help in ways that the Japanese couldn’t help themselves. But that’s just me being oversensitive. I get that the real feeling behind the hashtag is the same as the feeling behind this blog post. That we are thinking a lot about the people in Japan, and we hope they’ll be okay. Because that’s really all we can do (apart from give money, of course).

Bake-Jizo at Kanmangafuchi Abyss, Nikko. They are the guardians of the souls of children and travellers. (photo by me)

Iron giant on the roof of the Ghibli Museum, Tokyo (photo by @snazzydee)

(This post is part of an occasional series where I talk about books I like. They’re not reviews – I’m calling them book clutches, because they’re all books that I want to clutch close to me.)

“I liked breathing it in.”

And he doesn’t get it. So I say

“That air. The air afterwards. I wanted to breathe it in. It felt right to breathe it in. Because we were breathing them in, weren’t we? And the buildings. We were breathing it all in. And I thought, there’s a part of this that’s actually a part of me now. I now have that responsibility. I am alive, and I am breathing, and I can do the things this dust can’t do.”

I’ve always been a big David Levithan fan – Pink is dedicated to him. So when I saw a copy of Love is the Higher Law*, I immediately snatched it up.

It’s the story of three teenagers, Claire, Jasper and Peter, who are in New York City on September 11, 2001. Perhaps not the cheeriest of subject matters, but in typical Levithan fashion, the book is so imbued with hope and love and friendship and humanity that it outshines the fear and the tragedy, and while the book is very sad, it is ultimately uplifting and life-affirming. I didn’t need to read the author’s note to realise that this is a deeply personal story. And that’s the novel’s greatest strength. The events of September 11 are personal to everyone – we all remember where we were when it happened, even those of us on the other side of the world. But Love is the Higher Law takes that a step further and lets us really be there, without feeling like we’re voyeurs or tourists.

___________

*I would like to know why, whenever I see the title of this book, U2′s One doesn’t pop up in my head. No. It’s this instead.

LOOK AT MAH FANCY NEW WEBSITE.

It's now liliwilkinson.com.au, not liliwilkinson.com. This is Important.

Also my blog is now here, and the RSS feed is here, but if you already subscribe via RSS it should update automatically.

Change your bookmarks!

Tolkien was a Catholic, for whom the basic issues of life were not in question, because the Church had all the answers. So nowhere in 'The Lord of the Rings' is there a moment's doubt about those big questions. No-one is in any doubt about what's good or bad; everyone knows where the good is, and what to do about the bad. Enormous as it is, TLOTR is consequently trivial. Narnia, on the other hand, is the work of a Protestant - and an Ulster Protestant at that, for whom the individual interaction with the Bible and with God was a matter of daily struggle and endless moral questioning. That's the Protestant tradition. So in Narnia the big questions are urgent and compelling and vital: is there a God? Who is it? How can I recognise him? What must I do to be good? I profoundly disagree with the answers that Lewis offers - in fact, as I say, I detest them - but Narnia is a work of serious religious engagement in a way that TLOTR could never be.

Hello There.

I went to the Ron Mueck exhibition at NGV yesterday. It was extraordinary.

My agent recently shared some of her teen writing, and as it's my birthday and you're not allowed to be too mean to me, I'm going to be brave and do the same.

The Hippopotamus's Birthday

He has opened all his parcels

but the largest and the last;

His hopes are at their highest

and his heart is beating fast.

O happy Hippopotamus,

what lovely gift is here?

He cuts the string. The world stands still.

A pair of boots appear!

O little Hippopotamus,

the sorrows of the small!

He dropped two tears to mingle

with the flowing Senegal;

And the 'Thank you' that he uttered

was the saddest ever heard

In the Senegambian jungle

from the mouth of beast or bird.

I'm so very pleased to tell you all that PINK has been Highly Commended for the Barbara Jefferis Award.


Barbara Jefferis was the founding President of the Australian Society of Authors, and the Award is for “the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”.

Last year Helen Garner won, so it's pretty nice company to be in.

You can view the shortlist and the other Highly Commended title here.

And here's what the judges said about PINK:

As a novel written for young adults, Pink deals in some refreshing and witty ways with the stock themes of confusion over sexuality, peer group pressure, and what not to wear. While Ava’s parents have no problems with her lesbianism or goth attire, she is not so sure. She dons a pink cashmere jumper and switches schools. But rather than just inverting a conventional coming-out plot to produce something more conservative, Pink complicates the simple trajectory of this kind of narrative. It depicts young women, gay and/or straight, positively, and offers a far from neat conclusion. Ava, having learnt several Emma-esque lessons about tolerance and judgment, still remains undecided.

So there's been a bit in the media lately about women writers and some other related bits and pieces. And I know this is a soapbox that I've jumped up and down on before, but I'm going to have to keep jumping for now.

First, there's an article in the Telegraph about the Orange Prize, a literary award for women writers:

Given that women have won five out of the last six Whitbread/Costas, does the level of injustice remain enough to justify the Orange?

Women are predominant, in terms of numbers and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises women readers. They are favoured by what is overwhelmingly the most important publishing prize (the Richard and Judy list), and comprise most of the reading groups that drive sales. Girls in schools are more literate than boys, and pupils are taught reading mainly by female teachers promoting mainly female writers.

• Six out of the last 20 Booker Prize Winners have been women.
• Two out of the last 20 Booker Prize Winners have had a female protagonist. That's 10%.
• Publisher's Weekly's Best Books of 2010 list are all by men.
• Our own Miles Franklin longlist features 3 women and 9 men.
  
• There are more women working in publishing than men, more women write books and more women read books. This is all true. Yet capital-L-literary awards are undeniably skewed towards men.
• There are more female teachers because teaching continues to be a low pay, low status job.
• Despite this, the vast majority of class texts are by men, and feature male protagonists.
• In VCE this year, there are 9 texts available by women, and 27 by men.
  
• I know of a local private girls' school where, from Years 7-10, not one text is studied featuring a female protagonist. NOT. ONE.

"I just want to say," I said as the meeting closed, "that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it's disgusting."
Our default is that women are small, men are universal.

I am a life long reader and have read thousands of books, however I have read probably less than 20 books written by women. Women write differently from men and I feel their efforts appeal mostly to other women.