Greg Heffley is lazy, hapless, scheming, funny and sometimes paranoid. He’s also the world’s most famous wimp. 

The star of Jeff Kinney’s phenomenally popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid series isn’t always loveable – he’s a classic anti-hero – but maybe that’s why kids worldwide have been hooked on Greg’s middle-school misadventures right from the start. Kinney published the first…

This May, hear from two heavyweights of young adult fiction – in Melbourne and Kyneton.

American writer Jesse Andrews is best known as the author (and scriptwriter) of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a touching, funny YA sensation turned award-winning film – and his debut. He’s since written The Haters – and now, Munmun. A dystopian fantasy, it’s provocative…

This May, hear from two heavyweights of young adult fiction – in Melbourne and Kyneton.

American writer Jesse Andrews is best known as the author (and scriptwriter) of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a touching, funny YA sensation turned award-winning film – and his debut. He’s since written The Haters – and now, Munmun. A dystopian fantasy, it’s…

Rural Australia – indeed, rural anywhere – is a storytelling fixture. But in many ways, it’s specifically small towns that make a perfect setting for fiction, and a potent backdrop to coming of age.

A writer might draw on the intense social relations (or seething suspicions) of people living in each other’s pockets; the pleasures and pressures of being too near…

Remember the world before June 1997? If you can't, don't worry; you didn't miss much. The world was a dull, uninspired, basically pointless place. Nobody had ever heard of quidditch or boggarts or kneazles. Hardly anybody even knew how to pronounce 'Hermione'.

Luckily, J.K. Rowling stepped up and fixed everything. By imagining the incredible world of Hogwarts and writing the…