Three Canberra children's book creators can now boast a prized gold or silver sticker on the cover of their work, after winning or being honoured in the prestigious Book of the Year Awards on Friday at the State Library of NSW in Sydney.
Canberra punched above its weight in the awards run by the Children's Book Council of Australia, with local authors featuring in three of the six categories.
Rivett author Dr Stephanie Owen Reeder even edged out literary titan Tim Winton to take out the Eve Pownall Award with her book Peculiar Parents.
The 75-year-old former Hansard editor started writing children's books in her retirement and now has two Book of the Year awards.
"It's been an amazing journey for me and I'm blown away and I was even more blown away, considering we were up against Tim Winton," she said, of her win.
It's been a big year for Stephanie, already.
Peculiar Parents also won the Children's (Non-Fiction) Award in the 2026 ACT Literary Awards. She was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to children's literature in this year's Australia Day honours. And her face was also added this year to a Hughes community mural at the local shops.
Peculiar Parents, illustrated by Ingrid Bartkowiak, celebrates the diversity and differences of family units within the animal world. Tim Winton was shortlisted in the category for his first picture book, Ningaloo: Australia's Wild Wonder.
But it was Stephanie's book which took out the Eve Pownall Award, which celebrates factual books for children.
"It features 60 Australian animals and it features their weird, wild, wonderful and sometimes revolting mating, child-rearing, house-building - all the things that go into raising their young," she said.
Watson illustrator Eleri Harris snagged one of the sought-after gold stickers with her first book, A Loo of One's Own, receiving the award for New Illustrator.
She also wrote the book, which is based on the true story of Australia's first two female parliamentarians arriving at Parliament House only to discover there were no female toilets. A Loo of One's Own also received an honour in the Eve Pownall Award.
It was almost an accidental book for the comic book illustrator, with the work starting as a "glorified slide show for a live storytelling event".
"Sandra Nobes was the designer for the book and I felt she was a really great sounding board for ideas around the layout and she picked a really cool font that looked like my handwriting. That stuff was really fun."
Eleri said winning the Illustrator Award was "pretty meaningful".
"My mum passed away in February this year and she was an artist, a glass artist, and she taught me how to draw," she said.
Eleri had already discovered that children had also discovered the value of a Book of the Year sticker.
"I had a really lovely experience when I was put on the shortlist," she said.
"A couple of days after the announcement, I was in the Majura Primary School library with my son and his friend Minha. And Minha was showing me a book she'd found on the shelf and she said, 'You know this is a good one, Eleri, because it's got the sticker on it'.
"And I was like, 'Minha, do you know I'm going to get a sticker?'. And she was like, 'No way! That's amazing!'. And gave me a high five.
"Yes, we'll probably sell more books but that, for me, was the moment."
Canberra author Sandy Bigna's book Little Bones will have a silver sticker on the front cover after receiving an honour in the Book of the Year: Younger Readers category.
"I think you dream about being shortlisted for the CBCA book awards, they're so iconic," she said.
"It means your book is going to get greater exposure in books and libraries. It's an incredible honour."
Her book is a verse novel for readers aged nine to 12, fuelled by her own childhood love of poetry and music.
"It's a slightly quirky story, a little bit different, about a young girl who accidentally brings to life the skeleton of a young bird," Sandy said.
"She's coping with loss and other gritty themes like that and I think writing it in this format was probably the best way to explore those challenging topics for kids."
This year, 332 groups of children also voted in "shadow judging" for the awards.
Margot McGovern's feminist horror novel This Stays Between Us won the Older Readers category, Dear Broccoli illustrated by Cate James, and written by Jo Dabrowski won the Picture Book award, and Renée Treml's The Thylacine and the Time Machine, a non-fiction graphic novel around the de-extinction of the Tasmanian tiger, was selected as their Eve Pownall award winner.
Opinions of the adults and young readers were close in two categories, with two honour books judged to be the shadow judge's winners - Sarah Armstrong's suspenseful thriller Run won the Younger Readers while Derek the story of a fish who asks a lot of questions won the Early Childhood category.
