‘The younger sibling of horror’: thriller novel wins children’s book of the year

Growing up, author Tristan Bancks was obsessed with horror. When he was 12, he jumped from reading Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox to Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and The Shining.

Bancks’ novel Scar Town has been named the 2024 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for younger readers.

Author Tristan Bancks in Sydney.Credit: Louise Kennerley

Scar Town is about a town sunk beneath a lake that reemerges during a drought. When exploring the surreal town, three local kids venture inside one of the houses, where they find a stash of money and human bones.

“It’s sort of the younger sibling of horror – more of a thriller that deals with ideas like mortality,” Bancks says.

“I love writing the kinds of books I probably should have been reading [as a child] for kids now. Still with these big ideas, but [written] in an age-appropriate way, they’re not explicit,” he says, adding that children of different ages will take away different things from his books.

Bancks started his career as an actor on Home and Away, where he played Tug O’Neale. He then wrote his own segments for TV, then for teen magazines, and later scripts for short films.

“Writing at first came out of necessity, and then I started writing books,” he says. “It’s almost like writing chose me instead of my choosing it.”

One of the former actor’s favourite books growing up was Paul Jennings’ Unreal.

Grace Notes by Karen Comer is written in verse style.

“They were essentially funny short stories, but they had a darkness to them as well. Also Roald Dahl, it’s funny and they are light stories, but they also have a darkness. I always appreciated that as a kid,” he says.

“I like to think that Scar Town has that too, it has this lightness that kids can invest in, but then it also has ideas ... there in the layers.”

Announced on Friday, the council’s awards are some of the country’s most prestigious for younger readers. They have been held since 1946.

Winner of the Book of the Year award for older readers, Karen Comer’s Grace Notes, has this week also been shortlisted in the Young Adult category of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

Briony Stewart’s Gymnastica Fantastica! won Book of the Year: Early Childhood; Timeless by Kelly Canby took out Picture Book of the Year; and the Eve Pownall Award went to Isolde Martyn and Robyn Ridgeway (text) and Louise Hogan (illustrator) of Country Town.

The CBCA Award for New Illustrator went to Erica Wagner for Hope is the Thing, with the book’s text by Johanna Bell.

The announcement of the awards kicks off the council’s Children’s Book Week, which runs from August 17 to 23.

The full list of CBCA winners can be found at cbca.org.au

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