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SpineOut : June - July 2017
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BOOK RE- VIEWS Your books for YAs have been based on serious topics. Is it important to you to have the reader think about and explore issues that are important? One of the wonderful things about books, is that they enable us as readers to experience things more extreme, and more difficult than possibly anything experienced in our own lives. Books allow us the freedom to really discover places and people and ideas beyond our every day, they let us explore other existences and to really walk in someone else shoes. One of the things I try to do with my writing is to tell the stories that aren’t being told - to shine a light in the dark places that we may know exist, but that we turn away from and forget all too easily. To be able to create a space where those silenced and forgotten voices and stories can be heard gives readers the opportunity to decide for themselves whether to turn away, or whether to look more deeply at the world and people and ideas. One of the things I love about writing for a YA audience, is that these are readers who are working out exactly who they are in the world and what they believe in. These are readers who are looking forward to a future very different than the world we live in now, and they are beginning to understand their power to shape and change that world. The more voices and stories and lives they can experience, the better. What led you to write about child trafficking? Was it an event or a story you read that prompted the idea? The first time I thought to write about child trafficking was back in 2012. There was an article in The Age about 17 unaccompanied refugee minors who had gone missing from an immigration detention centre, and authorities feared they had been trafficked into slavery. At the time, I was in the middle of writing another book, but I knew there was a story in this. Who were these kids? How was slavery still an issue, and how was this happening in Australia? How did children just ‘disappear’ from an immigration detention centre? So I did what I always do when I feel the seed of a story, and I cut out the article and put it into my notebook. I didn’t think of it again. Then, when I was signing my contract for The Bone Sparrow, my publishers wanted to sign me up for a second book. I had a whole lot of ideas for stories, but none of them really excited me. And then I was reading The Guardian and came across an article about the huge increase of refugee minors who were being trafficked into slavery, and I knew straight away that I had my story. Funnily enough, I didn’t at that time remember the first article from 2012. But when I was moving my notebooks, a single article fell from the pages. It was the article from The Age, saved 4 years earlier. What sort of things did you learn when researching for your book? I learned so much. I am ashamed to say that I didn’t realise that slavery existed in countries like Australia and New Zealand and the UK, or in every single country in the world. I didn’t realise that children of all ages were being held against their will and forced to work to pay off ridiculous debts in our nail bars and beauty parlours and restaurants and farms and streets and homes. I didn’t realise that if every enslaved child in the world right now stood in a line holding hands, that line would stretch twice around the circumference of the world and then some. But what I did know is that the world tomorrow will be very different to the world today, and that gives me incredible hope. NEW BOOKS Q and A with zana Fraillon
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