Authors up for top prize

TWO Central Victorian authors have made the Children’s Book Council of Australia 2021 shortlist.

Katrina Nannestad is nominated in the younger readers category, while Christie Nieman received a nod in the older readers group.

Nieman said she is thrilled for her work to be recognised.

“It’s pretty phenomenal,” she said. “It’s the leading adjudicatory process in literature for young adults and kids.

“My first novel was on the notables so to have this one go one better shows that I’m moving in the right direction.

“It’s a brilliant shortlist to be on.”

Her novel, Where We Begin, was inspired during a drive Central Victoria.

“I was travelling cross the Moolort Plains between Newstead and Maryborough and plonked in the middle of it is this big two-storey blue stone Victorian mansion,” she said.

“It looks like it’s been dropped from outer space.”

“I just imagined it at night with a light on their and the story popped into my head.”

The novel follows a young girl from Sydney who leaves her world behind to see with her grandparents in the Victorian country, where she uncovers secrets about her family.

“She becomes enmeshed in the various history layered in the place of her family and that landscape of the generations of her family that came before,” Nieman said.

Nannestad’s book, We Are Wolves, is set during World War II and follows a family of three siblings.

“Their lives are turned upside down when Germany invades East Prussia and their family is forced to flee with the rest of the population,” she said.

“In the chaos and violence that pursues the children are separated from their family and left all alone to survive in what’s a really dangerous environment.

“They end up becoming like wild animals to survive.”

Nannestad said the story is inspired by an article she read about the Wolfskinder of East Prussia; children that were separated from their families during the war.

“They survived by living wild, by living as street urchins by stealing and raiding farms and living wild in the forest,” she said.

“I try write the types of stories I wish I’d been shown as a child.”

Ms Nannestad said she finds the process of learning something new and writing about it exciting.

“I always learn something about the process and myself,” she said. “Learning something new about a stage in history is really fascinating.”

“We all should be lifelong learners.”

The CBCA Book of the Year Awards are announced on Friday, 20 August.