News

Behind every successful creator is a first story, a first line, a first drawing. James Foley’s passion for art started young, with a step-by-step drawing of Bart Simpson and some ‘public murals’ on and underneath the tables of his childhood home. These days, James writes and illustrates for a living, and regularly presents to schoolkids […]

Award-winning author and teacher Sally Murphy has begun a new Teacher Tuesday segment on her website. Each week she’ll match one of her books with the curriculum links for a particular year level, starting with Looking Up for Year 3 classrooms.

Have you ever wanted to enlarge something to enormous proportions? Now you can* with the latest teaching activity for James Foley’s Dungzilla!

Norman Jorgensen’s The Smuggler’s Curse has won the 2017 West Australian Young Readers’ Book Award (WAYRBA).

The Holga is a medium format 120 film camera with a meniscus lens that is made in Hong Kong. Sydney photographer Sally Mayman loved the unpredictability of using it for the landscapes and some of the portraits in her new book, Seeing Saltwater Country. In this post, Sally takes you behind the scenes of some […]

Western Australian novelist Kate McCaffrey has collected the Australian Family Therapists’ Award for Children’s Literature for a third time. Her YA novel Saving Jazz won the $1500 Older Readers Award and a place on the list of titles recommended for use by family therapists.

Today I want to talk about Fremantle Press custom publishing – what it is, who should use the service and my top tips for making a publishing project a success for your organisation.

Sometimes a book fits into a very specific genre – a genre whose covers have a very specific set of codes that signal to readers what they can expect to find in that book. We all know, for instance, what kind of material will be in a book featuring the upper body of Fabio. But […]

When we first met Mimi Helm she was a Curtin University student and one of a group of emerging filmmakers who had been tasked with making a book trailer for Fremantle Press as part of their coursework.

Originally hailing from Sunderland, award-winning crime writer Alan Carter was a filmmaker and film editor before he became an author. His latest book, Marlborough Man, is inspired by his secluded home at the northern-most end of New Zealand. Alan intended to write the fourth book in his Cato Kwong series, but the isolated, dramatic landscape […]

Need a last-minute Book Week activity? Why not get your students to create and use semaphore flags or morse code? Morse code and the semaphore signalling method was used to communicate important military information, home-front anxieties and, eventually, hopes for a more peaceful world. We’ve created some handy activity sheets for the book Lighthouse Girl by […]

Jim Richards has done it all: dived for diamonds in the piranha-infested rivers of South America; discovered a fabulously rich goldmine in the Australian outback; got caught up in the world‘s biggest mining scam in Indonesia; and even started a gold rush in the jungles of Laos. To add to that list of adventures, he‘s […]

Between them Fremantle Press dads have done everything from panning for gold in the jungles of Laos to being named a Western Australian State Living Treasure. But what does Father’s Day involve for them?

Fremantle Press has been recognised on the Ned Kelly Awards shortlist for the third year in a row. Burn Patterns by Como author Ron Elliott is in the running for a 2017 Best First Fiction prize in Australia’s most prestigious crime writing award.

Nadine Browne, co-author of The Whip Hand, has secured a two-year scholarship to attend the New York University Graduate Writing Program. Browne said she would be working on her next novel, which was about a young Western Australian man leaving a closed Christian community.

At their best, writing groups and workshops can be positive experiences that transform the largely solitary act of writing into a shared endeavour with like-minded people. They can give authors the opportunity to network with peers and to glean those vital first-reader impressions and opinions.

Fremantle Press extends its condolences to the family and friends of the incomparable women’s campaigner and former WA senator Pat Giles. We were privileged to meet her at the launch of her life story, Among the Chosen, back in 2010. 

Class sets of bookmarks and activities for all our latest titles are available now, just in time for Book Week. There’s plenty to do and explore, so make sure to get your order in while stocks last.

We’re all familiar with school sports carnivals but how familiar are you with writing competitions? This guest post by author Melinda Tognini discusses writing competitions for young people. It is a great resource for teachers who have talented young writers in their classrooms. A downloadable poster is also available.

Kids and parents can help create a rainbow collage as part of a new exhibition at the State Library of Western Australia’s Story Place Gallery this month.

Swimming on the Lawn by Yasmin Hamid follows the adventures of Farida, who lives with her family in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Sudanese culture and customs are brought to life, from the ubiquitous tea service and hearty breakfasts to the commemoration of Muslim holidays and the rites of birth and death.

We have class sets of our free teaching activity; ‘Do you know your Aussie animals?’ available to order or download now. In the meantime, author Deb Fitzpatrick talks about her new novel, The Spectacular Spencer Gray, and why it features Australia’s most endangered mammal.

Prospective readers can, and do, judge a book by its cover. So how does a publisher choose the right cover for a book? Wherever we can, Fremantle Press uses local photographers and we are always on the lookout for more, so do take a look at our guidelines. The cover for Gwen, however, did not […]

Marketing and Communications Manager Claire Miller reports on her recent visit to the International Youth Library in Bavaria.