Festival Wrap - May 2014

We now have our New Zealand national team - Congratulations to Awakeri School, a school with a strong Kids' Lit Quiz pedigree, with its 2012 team winning the world final in that year.

The 2014 New Zealand national team

It is not long until the 2014 World Final in Cornwall. Congratulations to all of the national teams:

Australia: Canberra Grammar School
Canada: Royal St George's College, Toronto
New Zealand: Awakeri School
South Africa - St John's Preparatory School, Johannesburg
Singapore - Clementi Primary School
UK - City of London School for Girls
USA  - Sedgwick Middle School, Connecticut

We are confident that you will all be wonderful ambassadors for your schools and countries in 2014. Good luck to you all (but a little extra luck to the Australian team - with love from your families and friends!)

And with that news, it is time to thank everyone for taking part, helping out and, most of all, reading with us over the last few weeks.

We'll take a break for a couple of weeks before the 2014 World Final. I'll still be checking my emails so feel free to write in with comments, book reviews, donations (!!) and other book-related items of interest. The address is: readingforaustralia@gmail.com

After the jump, there's also some information about our fundraiser which not only helps the Australian team get to the world final but also raises funds for some of Australia's most disadvantaged children.

While we think it is important to celebrate our top readers, we - and the top readers themselves - also want to use this opportunity to focus attention on one of Australia's more critical literacy needs - those children who do not have access to literacy resources that many of us take for granted.

Looking for a Book to Read?

Writers are almost always readers first, so we ask our guest authors to tell us the titles of books they enjoyed as children as well as any books they've read recently which they'd recommend to other readers.

Previously, we've complied these into lists - here are last year's recommendations from May and November. This time, we thought it might be interesting to show you what the authors actually said about their book recommendations. Once again, Enid Blyton featured strongly. A prolific author, she clearly influenced generations of kids - some of whom grew up to also write children's books.

New York Public Library

Have a look at what last month's guest authors have to say about the books that influenced them and books they recommend as good reads.