K.O.A.L.A. stands for Kids Own (children all over NSW) Australian (select Australian) Literature (children's books) Awards (the creators - authors and illustrators receive an award). There are other state based children's choice award such as YABBA (Young Australians Best Book Awards Victoria established in 1986 with the first awards made at Taronga Zoo in 1987) and BILBY on a break right now (Books I Love Best Yearly Queensland).
By voting in the KOALA awards (children from NSW) can reward the Australian children's books that have most inspired, amused, terrified, enlightened and engaged them.
Children in NSW are invited to nominate their favourite Australian books, first published in the last 10 years and not a previous KOALA winner. A shortlist of 40 titles is drawn up from the nominations. (10 picture books, 10 titles for younger readers, 10 titles for older readers, and 10 fiction titles for readers in Years 7 to 9.)
KOALA is a clever name for this award. Koalas are Australian, iconic and the original designers of the program were lucky that every letter is perfect for their award title. Many very famous Australian illustrators have drawn or painted a koala for the awards website. Take a look here. My favourites are Mitch Vane; Anna Walker; Bob Graham and David Legge. KOALA began in NSW in 1987 so this year is 35 years of these awards!
When the awards began they were only for older and younger readers. The 1987 winners were Hating Alison Ashley (Robin Klein) and Possum Magic (Mem Fox and Julie Vivas). The full list of past winners can be found on the KOALA web page. Here are a few highlights:
Two wolves Tristan Bancks 2015
Annie's Chair Deborah Niland 2008
Dougal the Garbage dump Bear Matt Dray 2006
Mutt Dog Stephen Michael King 2005
Pocket Dogs Margaret Wild 2002
People might hear you Robin Klein 1992
Repeated titles or series titles that seem to pop up over and over again are of course the Storey Treehouse books by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton; the Bad Guys books by Aaron Blabey; Do not open this book (and variations) by Andy Lee and Heath McKenzie; Pig the Pug series by Aaron Blabey; Andy Griffiths Just series; Once etc by Morris Gleitzman; and Paul Jennings Un books.
Today I attended the announcement (with people not on ZOOM) of the 2022 KOALA award winners. You can see a poster of the winners here.
The two books that excited me (as an adult reader) were Three by Stephen Michael King and We are wolves by Katrina Nannestad. The popular choices (judged by the cheering from the students of seven schools who attended today) were Pig the Monster (Aaron Blabey); Weirdo Book 14 (Anh Do and Jules Faber); and Funny Kid (Matt Stanton).
One of the best parts of the ceremony today was watching the super talented Sami Bayly draw creatures from her newest book:
As Sami worked on her art various authors and illustrators came up on the stage to answer the question "what is the most unusual or weird or interesting place you've written in or were inspired to write a book".
Sue Whiting set her book Missing in a city in Panama and because she couldn't go there she watched a city live cam video (for many hours).
John Heffernan is inspired by trees on his farm - pine trees from Lone Pine at Anzac Cove. My own favourite John Heffernan book is this one. I recently completed the annotation on this title for The National Centre for Australian Children's Literature because they are preparing a wonderful database for teachers and teacher-librarians of picture books to use with older students.
Jaclyn Moriarty loves her local chocolate filled coffee shop.
Jules Faber once worked at JB HiFi and during his breaks he worked on the art for the first Weirdo book.
There were two other KOALA awards today - Hall of Fame awarded to Belinda Murrell and Koala Legend awarded to Meredith Costain.
I am going to predict that Stellarphant by James Foley and Walk of the whales by Nick Bland will be nominated and short listed next year.
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