Sonya Hartnett

Sonya Louise Hartnett (born 23 March 1968) is an Australian author of fiction for adults, young adults, and children. She has been called "the finest Australian writer of her generation". For her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" Hartnett won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2008, one of the largest cash prizes in children's literature.

She has published books as Sonya Hartnett, S. L. Hartnett, and Cameron S. Redfern.

Personal life and education

Hartnett was born 23 March 1968, in Melbourne, Australia to Philip Joseph and Virginia Mary Hartnett. In 1988, she received a Bachelor of Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Career

Hartnett was thirteen years old when she wrote her first novel and fifteen when it was published for the adult market in Australia, ''Trouble All the Way'' (Adelaide: Rigby Publishers, 1984). For years she has written about one novel annually. Although she is often classified as a writer of young adult fiction, Hartnett does not consider this label entirely accurate: "I've been perceived as a young adult writer whereas my books have never really been young adult novels in the sort of classic sense of the idea." She believes the distinction is not so important in Britain as in her native land.

Many of Hartnett's books have been published in the UK and in North America. For ''Thursday's Child'' (2000; 2002 in the UK), she won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers. The novel was eligible for such award in 2002 because it was her first publication in the UK. In 2008 she won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award which is administered by the Swedish Arts Council.

''Landscape with Animals'' controversy

In 2006, Hartnett was involved with some controversy regarding the publication of ''Landscape with Animals'', published under the pseudonym Cameron S. Redfern. The book contains many sex scenes and Hartnett was almost immediately "outed" as the author. She said that she wanted to avoid the book being accidentally shelved with her work for children in libraries and denied that she used a pseudonym to evade responsibility for the work or as a publicity stunt à la Nikki Gemmell's '' The Bride Stripped Bare''. In a review published in ''The Age'', Peter Craven savaged the book describing it as an "overblown little sex shocker", a "tawdry little crotch tickler" and lamented that Hartnett was "too good a writer to put her name to this indigestible hairball of spunk and spite". It was defended vigorously in ''The Australian'' by Marion Halligan ("I haven't read many books by Hartnett, but I think this is a much more amazing piece of writing than any of them") who chastised Craven for missing the joke ("How could an experienced critic get that so wrong?") and wonders why female authors writing frankly about sex is so frowned upon.

Awards and honours

In 2000 and 2003, ''The Sydney Morning Herald'' named Hartnett one of their Young Novelists of the Year.

In 2008, Hartnett received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which annually honours an author of children's books whose "a body of work known for its unflinching focus on the toughest aspects of life."

In 2016, ''Shelf Awareness'' included ''Golden Boys'' on their list of the best teen novels of the year.

Bibliography

Fiction

Picture books

* ''The Boy and the Toy'' (2010)
* ''Come Down, Cat!'' (2011)
* ''Blue Flower'' (2021)
* ''Go Home, Cat!'' (2022)

Junior fiction

* '' The Silver Donkey'' (2004)
* '' Sadie and Ratz'' (2008)
* '' The Children of the King'' (2012)

Teen and young adult fiction

* ''Wilful Blue'' (1994)
** produced as a play and performed at the Victorian Arts Centre
* ''Sleeping Dogs'' (1995)
* ''The Devil Latch'' (1996)
* ''Princes'' (1997)
* ''All My Dangerous Friends'' (1998)
* '' Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf'' (1999) (published in the UK in 2004)
* '' Thursday's Child'' (2000) (published in the UK in 2002)
* ''Forest'' (2001)
* '' Surrender'' (2005)
* '' The Ghost's Child'' (2007)
* ''Butterfly'' (2009)
* ''The Midnight Zoo'' (2010)

Adult fiction

* ''Trouble All the Way'' (1984)
* ''Sparkle and Nightflower'' (1986)
* '' The Glass House'' (1990)
* ''Black Foxes'' (1996)
*
* '' Of a Boy'' (adult, 2002) (first published in the UK as ''What the Birds See'' in 2003)
* ''Landscape with Animals'' (2006), as by Cameron S. Redfern
* '' Golden Boys'' (2014)

Memoirs

* ''Life in Ten Houses: A Memoir'' (2013)

Selected critical studies and reviews of Hartnett's work

* Review of ''Golden Boys''

See also

References

External links

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Sonya Hartnett
at Penguin Books
*

2002 interview

2007 interview

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hartnett, Sonya
20th-century Australian novelists
21st-century Australian novelists
Australian children's writers
Australian women novelists
Australian writers of young adult literature
Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winners
Guardian Children's Fiction Prize winners
Writers from Melbourne
RMIT University alumni
1968 births
Living people
British women children's writers
20th-century Australian women writers
Australian women writers of young adult literature
21st-century Australian women writers
People from Box Hill, Victoria