Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 29 July
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
When it comes to writing stories for children and young adults, is anything off limits? For the past decade, in the Once series, bestselling children’s author Morris Gleitzman has been telling the story of Felix, a Jewish boy struggling to survive during the Holocaust. Gleitzman’s novels in this series – the latest of which, Soon, explores the aftermath of World War II – are rightly celebrated for their deftness of touch and emotional authenticity, and for the author’s ability to avoid trivialising the perspectives of the young.
From Once to books like Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars and Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief, there have been a number of coming-of-age stories set during wartime aimed at children or young adult audiences. How are stories of war best represented to younger readers, and what is it about these classic coming-of-age novels – in which characters arrive at maturity often too early or all at once – that continues to fascinate and resonate?
Gleitzman will be joined by historian and writer Jordy Silverstein for a discussion that will appeal to readers of all ages, covering his powerful series and his reflections on the process of writing grown-up stories for children.
Featuring
Morris Gleitzman
Morris Gleitzman is a bestselling Australian children’s author. His books explore serious and sometimes confronting subjects in humorous and unexpected ways. His titles include Two Weeks With The Queen, Grace, Doubting Thomas, Bumface, Give Peas A Chance, Extra Time, Loyal Creatures and the series Once, Then, Now, After and Soon.
Morris lives in Sydney and Brisbane, and his books are published in more than twenty countries.
Jordy Silverstein
Jordy is a historian and writer. She is the author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn Books, 2015), co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016), and has been published in New Matilda, Overland and the Conversation.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in History at the University of Melbourne, researching a history of Australian government policy towards child refugees as part of the ARC Laureate Research Fellowship 'Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism from 1920 to the present'. Her other research projects have examined histories of modern Jewish identity, sexuality and collective memory.