Australian schools ban Craig Silvey’s books after he pleads guilty to possessing child exploitation material
Schools in Western Australia have permanently removed books by Craig Silvey after he pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child exploitation material.
Silvey, 43, entered guilty pleas to a pair of offences related to possessing images of child exploitation on Tuesday, according to the ABC.
Prosecutors dropped two other charges, including an allegation that he produced child exploitation material between February and June 2022.
Silvey, who has three children, was arrested in January after detectives from the police’s child abuse squad raided his home in Fremantle, near Perth, and seized electronic devices.
The court heard the writer had communicated online with child exploitation offenders over several days in January and had refused to provide passwords giving police access to his phone, laptop, and other devices, according to WA Today.
He was granted bail on a A$100,000 (£53,348) surety on the condition that he report to police three times a week and not undertake child-related work, including school visits.
His bail was continued on Tuesday and he was marked due to appear in court on 3 July for sentencing.
open image in gallerySilvey is one of Australia’s most successful contemporary novelists, with several of his books taught in schools and adapted for screen and stage. His 2009 novel Jasper Jones, a coming-of-age story set in a small Australian town, sold nearly a million copies worldwide and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.
Jasper Jones won the Australian Indie Book of the Year award in 2010 and was later adapted into a 2017 film starring Toni Collette and Hugo Weaving.
Honeybee, a 2020 novel about a transgender teenager, won at the 2021 Indie Book Awards, and Runt, a children’s novel published in 2022, won several literary prizes before being adapted into a 2024 feature film featuring Celeste Barber.
A stage adaptation of Runt was also indefinitely paused after charges against Silvey were first laid earlier this year.
Silvey’s fiction frequently focused on adolescence, isolation, racism, sexuality, and abuse, and his novels became regular texts in Australian secondary school English classes.
Western Australia’s education minister Sabine Winton confirmed that a temporary ban on his books in the region’s public schools would become permanent. “There is absolutely no place in our school system for works authored by someone who has admitted to such serious crimes,” she said.
“Now that he has pleaded guilty, those texts will not return to the curriculum. Predatory behaviour against children is abhorrent and has no place in our community, let alone in materials studied by students in our schools.”
Winton added that schools would receive support to revise lesson plans and replace texts, while pupils who had already studied Silvey’s books for ATAR examinations – the university entrance ranking system used across much of Australia – would not be penalised, reported 9News.
After Silvey’s arrest earlier this year, publishers Allen & Unwin and Fremantle Press stopped promoting his books.
Bookshops across Australia removed his books from sale while schools in both Western Australia and Victoria withdrew his books from reading lists.