I’m so thrilled that my board book, City Critters has been chosen as one of the Top 10 English Recommended Reads for the 2019 TD Summer Reading Club! The theme this year is the “Natural World.”
This is a free program! It encourages kids (and their adults) to read books produced by Canadians. Kids can participate at their local library.
Feeling so grateful. Thank you to everyone who makes this club possible!
Sometimes things happen so fast, I can’t keep up. It’s been such a hectic fall, I haven’t had a chance to blow my own horn! What’s a shamelessly self-promoting author to do??!!
So, I’m happy to say that Water Wow! has recently won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing for Children Award. WOW!! I’m not sure how that happened. (The last time I took physics was in Grade 9.)
Water Wow! is also a finalist for the Norma Fleck Non-Fiction Award. Winners are announced Nov 21. How exciting! Fingers crossed.
And finally, Eat Up! has been nominated for the OLA Silver Birch Non-Fiction Award. Kids will vote for their favourite book and winners will be announced in May.
I’m feeling very lucky (and a little overwhelmed) lately. Thank you to everyone who makes these awards happen. They make a huge difference to authors like me.
The things you can learn at your local library!
Thanks to Avi, our children’s librarian, for being more in the know than I am. He showed me a great review of the new book, Eat Up! in the April issue of Quill & Quire.
I was just as interested in the other book that was reviewed, Meatless? by Sarah Elton. I’ll have to find myself a copy.
…because copies of the new book just arrived AND the last book (Water Wow) just sold in Korea and China! (With apologies to Alphaville. And please sing “Korea” or “China” instead of “Japan.”)
Thanks to the Canadian Children’s Book Centre for including Water Wow in their Best Books for Kids and Teens 2016.
The CCBC has been promoting and supporting Canadian children’s books for over 40 years.
There are so many wonderful books on this year’s list. I wish I could read them all!
OK, so it was rainy, but that made it a perfect day for us to talk about water. Students from two Vancouver schools, False Creek Elementary and Jules Quesnel Elementary, came down to Granville Island to hear us talk about our infographic, Water Wow!. The energy was palpable, with over a hundred 11- and 12-year olds in the room.
We warmed up with some “wows!” and recruited a volunteer “wow” co-ordinator, who enthusiastically cued the audience. We talked about the water in their backyard—the watersheds on Vancouver’s North Shore—and around the world, such as the South-to-North Water Transfer Project in China.
A group of volunteers created a “human infographic” on stage, to demonstrate how water is distributed globally. We had a lot of fun with that, thanks to Paula’s fully-decorated signs!
Question period was lively, especially as some of the kids knew far more than we’d expected. And we were lucky to have Water Wow’s illustrator and designer in the audience and available to field questions about how the art was created.
It was a treat to connect with our audience directly. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and we left inspired!
I have a soft spot for the Vancouver Writer’s Festival because I volunteered for it for many years. It became one of my rituals of autumn, walking around Granville Island in the pouring rain with writers from around the world. Wet umbrellas and new ideas and good books to curl up with over winter!
So I’m thrilled to be part of it again this year, as an author this time. My co-author, Paula Ayer, and I will be giving a presentation on some of the ways water is truly amazing.
It’s also a perfect opportunity for me to hear some readings by authors from far away. How lucky I am!
Antonia Banyard 