Sonya Hartnett

Sonya Hartnett is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels for young people.

She is the author of  Thursday's Child, winner of the 2002 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and Forest, winner of the 2002 Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year: Older Readers.

In 2003, her adult novel, Of a Boy, published in the UK as What the Birds See (2003) won the Age Book of the Year 2003 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. It also won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (UK) Best Book 2003.

In 2004 The Silver Donkey was published to great critical acclaim. It has won the 2005 Courier-Mail award for young readers and was CBC Book of the Year (Young readers) in 2005.

Surrender was published in 2005. It received the Michael L. Printz Award (US) Young Adult Division 2005, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction 2005 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (UK) Best Book 2006, the Age Book of the Year 2005.

The novel for which Hartnett has achieved the most critical (and controversial) acclaim was Sleeping Dogs, an Honour Book, Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award: Older Readers in 1996, as well as winner of the 1996 Victorian Premier's Literary Award Sheaffer Pen Prize and the 1996 Miles Franklin Inaugural Kathleen Mitchell Award.

Her novels have been published traditionally as young adult fiction, but her writing often crosses the divide and is also enjoyed by adults.

In 2000 and again in 2003, Sonya Hartnett was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelists of the Year. Her work has been published internationally with editions available in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Italy, Norway and Denmark.

Contact: Penguin Books Australia
peg.mccoll@au.penguingroup.com