Ursula Dubosarsky: Author – Australia

What did it mean? … For a while I asked myself that. But meanings, purposes—I learnt to give up on such things. The story meant everything and nothing at all. And both notions, I found to my surprise, sat comfortably together inside my head.

U. Dubosarsky, Black Sails 128

ursula dubosarsky was born into a family of writers in Sydney in 1961. She graduated in classical languages and literature at Sydney University in 1982. After travel and a year on a kibbutz in Israel, she returned to Australia where she published her first picture book for children, Maisie and the Pinny Gig (1989). Her travel has inspired her to write more books—such as The First Book of Samuel (1995), based on the life story of her Hebrew teacher on the kibbutz, and Bruno and the Crumhorn (1996), inspired by an encounter with an Early Music Society. Her other important publications include , The Red Shoes (2006), and The Golden Day (2011). Other than novels, Dubosarsky has also produced a great range of illustrated books such as The Terrible Plop (2012) and Too Many Elephants in This House (2012).

Dubosarsky’s writing is characterized by wordplay. She herself has said that “playing with words is perhaps like being born musical or visual, being born with a love of language.” An example of this is when she describes Frances’ mechanical reading in Red Shoes with “a low humming sort of voice, like a quiet lawnmower.”

In terms of characterization, Dubosarsky demonstrates real empathy with her child readers. Her child characters are always frustrated by the oddities of adult characters. They tend to be loners with intense imaginations, oddballs with the tendency of living in their own worlds free from adult’s ruling and common sense. In some cases, their imagination can even disrupt a perfectly ordered society—like in The Terrible Plop (2009), where a “plopping” voice transforms into a horrible monster. Over her career as a writer, Dubosarsky has been awarded nine national literary prizes, including five New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. Dubosarsky also has an impressive international profile, with books translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Russian, Estonian, Slovenian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew.