Recent good news: Gatsby has been shortlisted for an Australian Book Industry Award for best illustrated book! Yippee! I'm very thrilled about this, because the ABIA awards are voted by an "academy" of booksellers and publishers, who obviously look at the books from within the industry. It is especially exciting to hear that booksellers like Gatsby, because I appreciate that it can be a challenge shelving, displaying, promoting and selling books which don't easily fall into obvious categories - an issue that pops up all the time with picture books for adults. So big warm thanks to those fabulous booksellers, and fingers crossed!The "illustrated books" category is separate from the children's books categories, and apparently (or so a publisher friend tells me) it tends to include mostly non-fiction books, with the illustrations being largely photographic. Gatsby does seem to be the only one this year in which drawings play a very large role. So it will be interesting to see what happens.
Speaking of pictures, here's a little Hamlet detail of some poisonous morning glory (at right). I'm getting very into the creepy flower paintings at the moment, rolling up the sleeves and splashing around liberal amounts of those acrylic inks. The pics are inspired by illustrations from the fabulous Taschen Book of Plants. Hamlet is cracking along fast and furious, so I'm very pleased.
It's been a busy time generally, with lots of speaking gigs - not to mention puppy training! I'm gearing up for a jammed schedule at the Sydney Writers Festival next week. By all accounts it's a great festival, and the program is enormous. I'll be doing a few workshops and a couple of talks, mostly for the secondary schools program. Should be fun.
3 comments:
Oooh, colour.
I never realised morning glory was poisonous although i know it is a noxious weed. I guess Hamlet didn't really care about that seeing as Australia was a vague idea to Europe back then :)
Congrats re: ABIA shortlist! 8)
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