Happy 2012 to all my visitors; I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and a refreshing break over the holidays. I am now back at my desk taking stock of all that happened in 2011 and looking forward to the challenges ahead for 2012.  It promises to be a very busy year indeed.

After the publication of the final Minivers book in March 2011, I began work on several new projects. The first of these is my wonderful new picture book, Pom Pom: Where are You?, on which I and my long-time illustrator Cheryl Orsini worked very hard. Pom Pom is set in Paris, a city I love very much—some of you will be aware that my grandmother, Henriette was a World War I war bride from Rouen, and I have always been proud of my French blood. It was a wonderful text to write, and as Cheryl has excelled herself with the illustrations, I can truly say I am happier with it than any other picture book I have worked on. You can see the cover and read a little bit about it in the New Titles section. (Yes, Pom Pom’s owner is named after my grandmother.) Pom Pom is going to be published in the middle of 2012 by Penguin, and I’ll be posting more about it over the next few months as we get closer to publication.

The other big news is that late last year I signed a four book contract with Penguin to write some novels for their successful Our Australian Girl series. This series of historical novels looks at the lives of young girls at different periods in Australian history, for example, during Federation, in the Gold Rush, and in the Convict era. The books I will be writing are going to be set in Queensland during the Depression, and I am particularly excited about these titles because I am basing my Australian Girl character, Annie Collins, on my maternal grandmother (the Australian one, not the French one). This grandmother, who was born Hilda Martin, had an incredible childhood growing up in tiny country towns all over outback Queensland, where her father Jack was a policeman. During the Depression, the family moved to Brisbane, where as a young teenager she worked in an umbrella factory and became the sole breadwinner for her parents and older brother. The four books will follow Annie from outback Torrens Creek and Hughenden in north-western Queensland, to the cane country around Ayr and Brandon, and back to Brisbane for the last two stories.

I have been doing an enormous amount of research for these books, and in December had a great time with my family visiting the places in North Queensland where the first two novels are to be set. This experience gave me a whole new appreciation of the conditions under which my grandmother grew up, as the places she lived in were incredibly small and isolated (she even travelled to some of them by Cobb and Co, which operated coach services in outback Queensland well into the 1920s). The photo of me that heads this post was taken at White Mountains National Park, outside of Torrens Creek, where I’ve set the first novel Meet Annie. I’m already hard at work on it, and will be posting more information in the months to come. The  Annie Collins books should be published by Penguin in 2013.