Sonya Hartnett

Sonya Louise Hartnett (born 23 March 1968)^[1] is an Australian author of fiction for adults, young adults, and children. She has been called "the finest Australian writer of her generation".^[2] For her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" Hartnett won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2008, one of the largest cash prizes in children's literature.^[3][4]

She has published books as Sonya Hartnett, S. L. Hartnett, and Cameron S. Redfern.^[5][6]

Hartnett was born 23 March 1968, in Melbourne, Australia to Philip Joseph and Virginia Mary Hartnett.^[1] In 1988, she received a Bachelor of Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.^[1]

Hartnett was thirteen years old when she wrote her first novel and fifteen when it was published for the adult market in Australia, Trouble All the Way (Adelaide: Rigby Publishers, 1984).^[7][8] For years she has written about one novel annually.^[6] Although she is often classified as a writer of young adult fiction, Hartnett does not consider this label entirely accurate: "I've been perceived as a young adult writer whereas my books have never really been young adult novels in the sort of classic sense of the idea." She believes the distinction is not so important in Britain as in her native land.^[9]

According to the National Library of Australia, "The novel for which Hartnett has achieved the most critical (and controversial) acclaim was Sleeping Dogs".^[5] The book, which involves incest between siblings, is "often critiqued as 'without hope'" but has "generated enormous discussion both within Australia and overseas."^[5]

Many of Hartnett's books have been published in the UK and in North America. For Thursday's Child (2000; 2002 in the UK), she won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers.^[10][11] The novel was eligible for such award in 2002 because it was her first publication in the UK. In 2008 she won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award which is administered by the Swedish Arts Council.^[12]

In 2006, Hartnett was involved with some controversy regarding the publication of Landscape with Animals, published under the pseudonym Cameron S. Redfern. The book contains many sex scenes and Hartnett was almost immediately "outed" as the author. She said that she wanted to avoid the book being accidentally shelved with her work for children in libraries and denied that she used a pseudonym to evade responsibility for the work or as a publicity stunt à la Nikki Gemmell's The Bride Stripped Bare.^[13] In a review published in The Age, Peter Craven savaged the book describing it as an "overblown little sex shocker", a "tawdry little crotch tickler" and lamented that Hartnett was "too good a writer to put her name to this indigestible hairball of spunk and spite".^[2] It was defended vigorously in The Australian by Marion Halligan ("I haven't read many books by Hartnett, but I think this is a much more amazing piece of writing than any of them") who chastised Craven for missing the joke ("How could an experienced critic get that so wrong?") and wonders why female authors writing frankly about sex is so frowned upon.^[14]

In 2000 and 2003, The Sydney Morning Herald named Hartnett one of their Young Novelists of the Year.^[15]

In 2008, Hartnett received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which annually honours an author of children's books whose "a body of work known for its unflinching focus on the toughest aspects of life."^[16]

In 2016, Shelf Awareness included Golden Boys on their list of the best teen novels of the year.^[17]

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2016)

• The Boy and the Toy (2010)
• Come Down, Cat! (2011)
• Blue Flower (2021)

• The Silver Donkey (2004)
• Sadie and Ratz (2008)
• The Children of the King (2012)

• Wilful Blue (1994)
  • produced as a play and performed at the Victorian Arts Centre
• Sleeping Dogs (1995)
• The Devil Latch (1996)
• Princes (1997)
• All My Dangerous Friends (1998)
• Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf (1999) (published in the UK in 2004)
• Thursday's Child (2000) (published in the UK in 2002)
• Forest (2001)
• Surrender (2005)
• The Ghost's Child (2007)
• Butterfly (2009)
• The Midnight Zoo (2010)

• Trouble All the Way (1984)
• Sparkle and Nightflower (1986)
• The Glass House (1990)
• Black Foxes (1996)
• Earls, Nick; Sonya Hartnett; Heide Seaman (1998). There must be lions : stories about mental illness. Charnwood, A.C.T.: Ginninderra Press.
• Of a Boy (adult, 2002) (first published in the UK as What the Birds See in 2003)
• Landscape with Animals (2006), as by Cameron S. Redfern
• Golden Boys (2014)

• Life in Ten Houses: A Memoir (2013)

• Case, Jo (September 2014). "Bearing witness". Australian Book Review. 364: 13. Review of Golden Boys

• Official website
• Sonya Hartnett at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Sonya Hartnett at British Council: Literature
• Sonya Hartnett at Penguin Books
• Sonya Hartnett at Library of Congress
• 2002 interview
• 2007 interview