"This is my home" Book launch

This is My Home is a beautiful picture book created by young children and their parents which explores and celebrates the concept of home.

This stunning children’s book is the fourth book in a collection of intergenerational storytelling with the same families over the past nine years – including Donkeys Can’t Fly on Planes (2012), In My Kingdom (2014) and All the Way Home (2015). All four books have been co-created by Kids’ Own Publishing in collaboration with several different artists and designers.

Through the telling of their own stories, in their own words, the young authors of This is My Homefundamentally challenge one-dimensional representations of diversity in Australia. The voices in This is My Home layer on the pages like the sounds of a family gathering at a dinner table; a rich, complex and heartfelt expression of the centrality of home in our lives and the memories we make together.

Against the enormous challenges presented to us over the past two years, Kids’ Own Publishing artists Agum Maluach and Vonda Keji worked with the community to produce the vibrant, colourful artworks, and to gather the text and stories from children and their parents. The original authors of Donkeys Can’t Fly On Planes, now young adults, worked alongside their younger siblings to facilitate new stories, from their homes during Victoria’s first lockdown last year. The book designer, Jenna Mae Lee, has elegantly pulled all these elements together to create a powerfully personal interpretation of this poignant theme.

This publication has been brought to life through support from the ‘Help Kids Publish’ Pozible campaign in 2019, the Australian Catholic University and the ARC Laureate Fellowship on the History of Child Refugees.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase from Saturday 14 August.