Children’s Book Week: Picture books to hook kids on reading

GREAT picture books can get children on the reading path for life. Discover a cornucopia of old favourites and new classics as we celebrate Children’s Book Week.

Picture books, especially, symbolise happy times spent together as little ones discover the joy of stories and reading. Picture: Supplied

• Read up, the word’s out on libraries
• Babies ready for story time early

THEY are so full of life, love and memories, many parents find children’s books almost impossible to throw out … even after the youngest has left home.

Picture books, especially, symbolise happy times spent together as little ones discover the joy of stories and reading.

But our love of them is also about the incredible art in contemporary picture books.

Australia’s young readers are blessed with some of the most innovative children’s book creators, artists so in tune with what ignites imaginations that opening the book feels like jumping into a perfect world.

Australian children’s illustrated writing grew from strong foundations. Think May Gibbs’ iconic Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding.

Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay

Possum Magic by Mem Fox.

In recent decades the form has produced a cornucopia of new classics, such as Animalia by Graeme Base, Diary of a Wombat and Pete the Sheep by Jackie French and Possum Magic by Mem Fox.

Each year, the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards some of the year’s greatest titles, and the 2017 winners are no exception.

The CBCA gave its first annual Children’s Book of the Year Award (to Leslie Rees for The Story of Karrawingi the Emu) in 1946. The awards have since become Australia’s longest-running and most prestigious children’s literature prizes.

Past winners include Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy (1964), Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park (1980), Robin Klein’s Came Back to Show You I Could Fly (1990) and Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1993).

This year’s Book Week kicks off today, with a theme of Escape to Everywhere.