Gary Crew

Gary Crew is Australia's most awarded author for children and young adults having won the Children's Book Council Book of the Year four times - twice for his young adult novels and twice for his illustrated books.

He has also won the National Children's Book Award, the NSW and Victorian Premiers' Awards, the Ned Kelly Award for crime fiction and twice been short listed for the Edgar Allan Poe Mystery Fiction Award in the USA.

Crew won the CBC Book of the Year: Older Readers for Strange Objects and Angel's Gate, CBC Honour Book for Memorial (2000), CBC Picture Book of the Year for First Light (1994); CBC Picture Book of the Year for The Watertower (1995). He is also the author of The Viewer and Mama's Babies, which were CBC Notable Books for 1998 and 1999 respectively. The Lost Diamonds of Killiecrankie was also a notable book in 1996.

Reading Australia: 'The Lost Thing' by Shaun Tan

Reading Australia • 02 November 2016

Written and illustrated by Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing (2000) prompts readers to ask: ‘Who is this book for and what does it mean?’ Tan, in a personal email to the author, himself confesses that the work is a fable ‘about all sorts of social concerns with a rather ambiguous ending’, while the unnamed narrator of the story nonchalantly confesses: ‘don’t ask me what the moral is’. For th ... (read more)