Podcast: Melina Marchetta and David Levithan

I started to read Melina Marchetta’s latest novel, The Piper’s son, but got caught up with other things at school and other books. Last week, while I was in a country city bookshop, I saw that Bolinda Books had an audio version available so I thought that this was a way I could finally “read the book”. I have quite a few 3+ hour trips to the country and I like to listen to audio or podcasts during this time.

A few days ago I caught up with the Radio National Book Show podcasts and  listened to a recording of a session from the 2010 Sydney Writer’s festival. It involved Melina Marchetta and David Leviathan, another author of YA fiction, the latest being Will Grayson, Will Grayson, talking about writing YA literature and their novels.

The description on the site is as follows:

Anger and age: how do you handle the angry young and how do you write characters mature enough to be engaging but not distancing for younger readers? They’re issues that writers David Levithan and Melina Marchetta have been dealing with in their books for more than a decade now.

Melina and David were guests at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival in a session on the challenges of creating authentic teen characters. An edited version of the session, chaired by Judith Ridge. who is a critic and teacher of Children’s writing”

It was an interesting discussion that ranged from their respective approaches to writing to censorship issues and collaboration with other writer.

If you want to know more about Melina Marchetta and the Piper’s son there is an interesting interview (March 2nd) you can read on Persnickety Snark blog as well as a review of the book written a day before the interview.

Melina Marchetta Podcast

The ABC’s Life Matters program today ran an interview with Melina Marchetta.

In this interview Melina explains that the story of The Piper’s Son and the character of Tom Mackee began forming in Melina’s head during an episode of Australian Story. In the interview Melina describes how her ideas formed for the story and the characters and something about the processes she used when writing this book. 

It is a 15 minute interview and well worth listening to. Budding writers would also enjoy her thoughtful discussion. 

New novel from Melina Marchetta

This week as I was rushing past a book display I saw The Piper’s Son has been published. It had not been brought to my attention by my regular book suppliers so I had not seen it before this. This is the latest book by Melina Marchetta. Two of her earlier books that have been widely read and enjoyed in our school were Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca. This new novel is a companion to Saving Francesca, set five years later and the character Thomas Mackee seems to have lost the plot and his life is out of control.

I have only had time to have a quick glance though it but the story appears to be about family, grief, and love. As always the writing in the parts I have had a chance to look at make it for the reader to identify with the characters and the situations. I think this will be another book that will interest our male teenage readers and I really like the cover that has been chosen. I thought of the classic Catcher in the Rye when I first saw it! We have a 3-day weekend and so I am looking forward to reading this book properly (perhaps with coffee and cake for some of the time!)

One of my pet hates are the bad/inappropriate covers that are given to great/interesting books. This is where I then have to spend the first few  minutes convincing  our readers to pick up a book that I know they will like once they get past that cover. In our library we put up copies of the covers of many of the new novels to let the students know what new books have come in and to entice them into reading them.

Speaking of advertising books I also found out that Allen and Unwin have some author posters that you can download and/or print for your library or classrooms. 

From the Insideadog site:

If you live in Victoria you can meet Melina Marchetta, one of Australia’s very good YA authors, (and Printz Award winner) on Sunday March 14 at 2pm at Experimedia at the State Library of Victoria. (The venue has changed from the earlier advertised one - Village Roadshow Theatrette.)

The Piper’s Son, Melina’s new book, will be under discussion with Penni Russon.

Bookings here. Cost is $5 on the door and includes cake. Readings will be there for book sales and a signing session will follow the talks and questions.