CBCA Clayton’s Night (Ballarat) 2016: Older Readers Category

On Thursday night, I had the honour of being one of the guest judges for the CBCA Clayton’s Night (Ballarat) event. In case you don’t know, Clayton’s Night is held annually by the CBCA in a number of locations, and is a wonderful evening with presentations from industry experts and Australian children’s literature lovers. The five categories — Early Childhood, Picture Books, Eve Pownall, Younger Readers, and Older Readers — are assigned a guest judge who must then read the list of nominated titles and create a shortlist of only six. And a few notables, luckily.

Here’s the official disclaimer from the CBCA website:

“Guest judges are asked to look at the entries from each year and pick a personal ‘best of’. They don’t have any correspondence with the official judges, and their selections are their own. In addition, each of the guest judges only presents books in one of the five national categories: the three age-based categories – Older Readers, Younger Readers and Early Childhood – and the two general categories – Picture Book and Eve Pownall.”

I was delighted to be the guest judge for the Older Reader Category in the Ballarat region. The lovely Danielle Binks was the guest judge for the Melbourne Clayton’s Night, and her shortlist was just fantastic. I had a sensational time presenting my selections, so I thought I’d share them here.

1. One True Thing by Nicole Hayes

2. Every Move by Ellie Marney

3. The Girl, The Guy, The Artist and His Ex by Gabrielle Williams

4. Risk by Fleur Ferris

5. Cloudwish by Fiona Wood (this one’s my actual winner)

6. Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean edited by Kirsty Murray, Payal Dhar and Anita Roy

Notable #1: Freedom Ride by Sue Lawson

Notable #2: Zeroes by Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti

If you’re interested in reading about what I thought of these titles, and why I chose them, head on over to my blog Books and Other Dangerous Objects.