Sunny Garden

Acceptance speech

My first direct dealings with the CBC were at the 1996 conference in Brisbane. Patricia Wrightson spoke then of the time when a CBC award earned the winner a camellia, a handshake and an afternoon tea. Happy as I am that there's now even more to the prize than that, I would also have been very pleased to have travelled here today to accept a camellia, a handshake and an afternoon tea.

I migrated from Northern Ireland at the age of eight in the early seventies, and one of the first Australian books I can recall reading was the 1974 CBC Book of the Year winner, Patricia Wrightson's The Nargun and the Stars. The CBC Awards had credibility at Ascot State School, and it's possible that they introduced me to Australian fiction and began my slow realisation that it wasn't necessarily the same as fiction everywhere else. It wasn't simply Enid Blyton with better animals. It was, in fact, something I came to realise I wanted to be part of as a writer. Because of that, it means a lot to be recognised by the CBC.

I hadn't really expected that that would happen with this book. I figured I'd done myself in by working really hard - the same way I work with my adult fiction - to come up with a book that was easy to read, but that might offer more below the surface to those who looked for it. I'd like to thank the judges for finding it, for not judging me on my surface, and for calling 48 Shades of Brown hilarious and thought-provoking and acknowledging that one book can be both of those things.

I also appreciate the support I found for the book at home, from my agent Fiona Inglis, from the Australia Council and from the people at Penguin who worked hard with me so that we could make the most of it.

I welcome the recognition that this gives my work, and I also welcome the recognition it gives this kind of writing. Perhaps even more than that, I welcome the fact that it recognises this kind of character and this kind of story. Dan is, like all of us, an individual in some ways, but he's also a pretty regular suburban Australian teenager, dealing with regular issues. He's smart and funny and awkward and the disasters in his life are regular survivable suburban disasters.

At a time when a lot of books with teenage central characters deal with big issues, this award recognises, and tells Australian teenagers, that sometimes the regular issues are big enough - sufficiently valid to sustain a story, big enough to give a writer a lot to work with, important enough to be worth reading about.

Disclaimer:
Sunny Garden is designed, written and maintained by Liz Perkins, in cooperation with Nick Earls, Penguin Books and Random House Australia. Any questions about Sunny Garden should be directed to Liz

All original contents are © Liz Perkins.