Aurealis Award for Best Children's Fiction facts for kids

The Aurealis Awards are special awards given out every year in Australia. They celebrate amazing Australian writers who create stories in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. These awards are presented by two groups: Chimaera Publications and WASFF.

To win an award, a book or story must be published by an Australian writer. It also needs to come out between January 1st and December 31st of the year before the awards. The awards ceremony happens the next year. What started as a small gathering of about 20 people has grown into a big two-day event with over 200 attendees!

Since they began in 1995, the Aurealis Awards have recognized many types of speculative fiction. This is a big term for stories that imagine things that aren't real, like magic or future technology.

Current award categories include:

• Science fiction (for novels and short stories)
• Fantasy (for novels and short stories)
• Horror (for novels and short stories)
• Speculative young adult fiction (for novels and short stories)
• Collections of stories
• Anthologies (books with stories by different authors)
• Graphic novels or illustrated works
• Children's books
• A special award for overall excellence in speculative fiction

Publishers pay close attention to these awards. They see them as a way to find the best new books in science fiction and fantasy. Big publishers like HarperCollins and Orbit support the awards. This shows that winning an Aurealis Award is a truly important honor.

How Winners Are Chosen

A group of judges decides who wins the Aurealis Awards. First, many books are nominated. This creates a "long-list" of possible winners. Then, the judges narrow it down to a "short-list" of finalists.

Sometimes, two entries might be so good that the judges decide they are equally deserving. In this case, they can declare a tie. However, judges are encouraged to pick just one winner if possible. If the judges all agree that none of the nominated works are good enough, they can choose "no award" for that category.

The judges themselves are chosen through a public application process. The Award's management team carefully selects them.

Aurealis Award for Best Children's Fiction

This article focuses on the Aurealis Award for Best Children's Fiction. This award replaced two older categories in 2013. Before 2013, there were separate awards for:

• Aurealis Award for best children's fiction (told primarily through words)
• Aurealis Award for best children's fiction (told primarily through pictures)

In 2013, this combined award was simply called the Aurealis Award for Best Children's Book.

Winners and Nominees

The table below shows all the books that were nominated and won the Aurealis Award for Best Children's Fiction. The years listed are when the books were published. The award ceremonies always happen the following year.

• The years link to articles about literature from that year.
• Entries with a light yellow background are the winners.
• Entries with a white background are the nominees that made the short-list.
• If a story was part of a bigger book or magazine, the book title is listed after the publisher's name.

As of the 2021 awards (given out in May 2022), these authors have received the most nominations in this category:

• Lian Tanner (4 nominations)
• Bren MacDibble (3 nominations)
• Emily Rodda (3 nominations)
• Angelica Banks (2 nominations)
• Karen Foxlee (2 nominations)
• Rebecca Lim (2 nominations)
• Meg McKinlay (2 nominations)
• Jaclyn Moriarty (2 nominations)

  *   Winners and joint winners
  *   Nominees on the shortlist