Growing up in Bendigo, Zeno Sworder spent a lot of time outdoors.
"My dad wasn't a big fan of technology, so we had no car, no television, no screens in the house," he tells ABC Arts.
At the top of his street, there was one tree that stood out from the rest, with branches that were the perfect height for a kid to climb.
"I spent a lot of time up in that tree, and I would often talk to it," Sworder recalls.
These childhood memories partly inspired Sworder's latest picture book, Once I Was a Giant, about a tree that is cut down and turned into a pencil.
It's a book that he says "honour[s] the relationship that people can have with different forms of life".
Once I Was a Giant is one of the winners at the 2026 Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Awards, taking home the prize for Picture Book of the Year.
The judges described the book — which also won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for children's literature and Book of the Year and Children's Picture Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards — as "a wonderful mixture of the sophisticated and complex".
Other CBCA award winners include Darkest Night, Brightest Star by Barry Jonsberg, named Book of the Year for Older Readers; Inked, written by Karen Wasson and illustrated by Jake A Minton, which won Book of the Year for Younger Readers; and The Emperor's Egg by Rae Tan, which took out Early Childhood Book of the Year.
This year marks the 80th CBCA Awards, which were established in 1946. Past winners of the coveted CBCA award sticker include Markus Zuzak, Melina Marchetta and Shaun Tan.
Sworder says the win — his second CBCA Award for Picture Book of the Year, following My Strange Shrinking Parents in 2023 — is a "huge honour".
"[It's] very special because I was one of those kids who would wander into the library without knowing much about what the good books were," he says.
"Those little stickers were a sign or a guiding post that this may be worth your time … To now be able to put one of those stickers on my book is hugely meaningful."
'Like writing a poem'
On the cover of Once I Was a Giant is an illustration of a tiny, caped figure — the wanderer — embracing an enormous tree in a forest.
However, the story begins with a series of images of a "picture-book maker" with writer's block who lives in "a concrete box" in the city.
"It's a story about a pencil that's recounting its life as a tree that grew up in a vast forest and the relationship that it formed with a small wanderer who passed through that forest every year," Sworder, who lives in Melbourne with his family, explains.
The pencil comes into the possession of the artist, through whose hand the story unfolds.
As Sworder was working on the book, protests to end logging in native forests were happening in Victoria.
The episode prompted Sworder and his daughters, now aged nine and 14, to begin reading books about the natural world.
Together, they learned about the social lives of trees: how they were connected by their root systems and fungal networks, sharing nutrients and even warning each other of danger.
Sworder began to wonder: If a tree was sentient, what kind of personality would it have?
Inspired, he set out to write a story that explored ideas of interconnection and metamorphosis and the divide between the urban and natural worlds.
Sworder likens writing a picture book, which is generally less than 500 words in length, to writing poetry.
"Like a poem, you're aiming to create a larger space within a very small number of words and to try to connect it to the reader's life in some way to fill in those emotional moments and create a little bit more impact and drama."
The illustrations add extra layers of meaning.
"Because I write and illustrate, I'm able to hold things back from the words and present them in the illustrations instead," Sworder explains.
"I love playing with the way the two forms are able to bounce off each other with the illustrations telling more of the emotional story and the text telling more of the conscious story and what's going on in the plot."
A lucky break
As a teenager, Sworder dreamt of being a comic book artist but ended up becoming an immigration lawyer in between working a variety of other jobs.
"I bounced around a lot," he says.
"I've worked in many Chinese restaurants; I taught English. But whatever job I was doing to get paid, I've always written stories or drawn in my spare time. That was just the way that I processed the world."
When his father and his grandmother, who was Chinese, died when his wife was pregnant with their youngest daughter, he decided to take what he'd learned from them growing up and turn it into a picture book.
"I sent it out to a hundred different agents and publishers," Sworder says. "I had a spreadsheet and got absolutely no response back."
His luck changed when he sent it to a local publisher, Thames and Hudson.
"They were willing to take it on," Sworder says.
"The advice I'd received from some of the other agents was that it's a good book but because the main character was very culturally specific, the market appeal of the book would be limited.
"When I spoke to Thames and Hudson, I asked them if it would be an issue and they said that the energy of the little girl and her personality was what made them want to take that book on in the first place, and so they stuck to it, which I'm incredibly grateful for."
The result was This Small Blue Dot, which was named a Notable Book for Younger Readers at the 2021 CBCA awards and won Sworder the prize for Best New Illustrator.
Exploring contemporary masculinity
Darwin author Barry Jonsberg says Darkest Night, Brightest Star — winner of the older readers category — is a departure from his usually humorous books.
The novel's narrator, 13-year-old Morgan Pickford, lives with his father and older brother, Mitch, after their mother left when Morgan was two.
"He's brought up in a household that is dominated by toxic masculinity," Jonsberg, who was an English teacher for 38 years, says.
Morgan's father places great value in athletic prowess and pushes the unwilling Morgan to play sport.
"He wants his son to become a star," Jonsberg says.
Reluctantly, Morgan chooses soccer to please his father, who Jonsberg says "puts him through very rigorous training exercises so that he can be the very best that he can be".
It's only through friendship outside his family unit — with a boy at school called Gray and an elderly woman with dementia — that he learns being a man doesn't mean following his father's toxic example.
The judges praised Darkest Night, Brightest Star for the way it tackled contemporary issues around masculinity.
"This unvarnished and harshly realistic look at a boy discovering the toxicity and dysfunction of the world he inhabits is heartbreaking, but hopeful," they said in their report.
The seed for the book came from a story Jonsberg's wife, also an English teacher, told him after work one day about a conversation she had with a year 10 student.
"[He] said, 'I've always tried to please my father, but I don't think I ever will,'" Jonsberg recalls.
"The student didn't say any more, and my wife didn't push it because it didn't seem appropriate to her at the time, and we discussed the whole idea of parental expectations and how that can be damaging if parents push a kid in directions the kid doesn't want to go."
Jonsberg began writing Darkest Night, Brightest Star the following day.
"It's a story about Morgan's development as a person and finding the things that he loves to do," he says.
"It's also about compassion, kindness and understanding."
Fighting the fall in reading rates
Sworder says the CBCA plays a crucial role in the children's literature landscape.
"It's so valuable to have a body there to take the work seriously, to celebrate it, and then to encourage students throughout Australia to read and enjoy books."
Both Sworder and Jonsberg want to see more young people reading.
"It's a depressing scenario — all the evidence seems to suggest that, particularly for young adult readers, reading rates are declining not just in Australia but across the world," Jonsberg says.
Jonsberg — the author of more than 20 books, including 2013's My Life as an Alphabet, adapted into the 2019 film H Is for Happiness — is doing what he can to encourage kids to read.
"In my own small way, I'm trying to write entertaining and relevant books that hopefully will get some young readers thinking: 'Hey, books aren't such a bad thing, and maybe I'll give it a go,'" he says.
