The Victorian gold rush was a period in the history of Victoria, Australia, approximately between 1851 and the late 1860s. It led to a period of extreme prosperity for the Australian colony and an influx of population growth and financial capital for Melbourne, which was dubbed "Marvellous Melbourne" as a result of the procurement of wealth.
Penguin Books Limited is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Its success showed that large audiences existed for several books. It also affected modern British popular culture significantly through its books concerning politics, the arts, and science.
David Clive King was an English author best known for his children's book Stig of the Dump (1963). He served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in the last years of the Second World War and then worked for the British Council in a wide range of overseas postings from which he later drew inspiration for some of his novels.
Michael Lupica is an author and former American newspaper columnist, best known for his provocative commentary on sports in the New York Daily News and his appearances on ESPN.
Larrikin is an Australian English term meaning "a mischievous young person, an uncultivated, rowdy but good-hearted person", or "a person who acts with apparent disregard for social or political conventions".
Puffin Books is a longstanding children's imprint of the British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s, it has been among the largest publishers of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world. The imprint now belongs to Penguin Random House, a subsidiary of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Robert Duncan Drewe is an Australian novelist, non-fiction and short story writer.
Sir Allen Lane was a British publisher who together with his brothers Richard and John Lane founded Penguin Books in 1935, bringing high-quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market.
The Nargun and The Stars is a children's fantasy novel set in Australia, written by Patricia Wrightson. It was among the first Australian books for children to draw on Australian Aboriginal mythology. The book was the winner of the 1974 Children's Book Council of Australia Children's Book of the Year Award for Older Readers, and Patricia Wrightson was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 1977, largely for this work.
Timothy William Tovell was an Australian airman in World War I who, with the help of his brother Edward 'Ed' Tovell, smuggled a young French orphan out of France and to Australia.
Before Green Gables is the title of a prequel to the Anne Shirley series. The book was published in 2008 by Puffin, a division of Penguin Books, as part of Puffin's celebration of Anne Shirley's centennial anniversary, which sees the Anne Shirley series re-released to commemorate the event. The first book in the Anne Shirley series was Anne of Green Gables, which was published in 1908.
Peter Robert Corris was an Australian academic, historian, journalist and a novelist of historical and crime fiction. As crime fiction writer, he was described as "the Godfather of contemporary Australian crime-writing", particularly for his Cliff Hardy novels.
Barbara Jane Tanner, known as Jane Tanner, is an Australian children's book illustrator.
Alice Pung is an Australian writer, editor and lawyer. Her books include the memoirs Unpolished Gem (2006), Her Father's Daughter (2011) and the novel Laurinda (2014).
Judith Clarke was an Australian best-selling author of short stories for children and young adults.
Jen Storer is an Australian children's author. Many of her works have been short-listed for major Australian awards such as, the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year and the Aurealis Awards. Her works feature strong female characters, humour, adventure and, occasionally, elements of horror.
Jill Masefield McDonald was a New-Zealand-born children's writer and illustrator, working in the United Kingdom from the mid-1960s. Much of her work was done for Puffin Books, the children's imprint of Penguin, and for its club's magazine Puffin Post.
Davina Bell is an Australian literary editor and children's writer. Her 2020 book, The End of the World Is Bigger than Love, won a New South Wales Premier's Literary Award in 2021.
