Cirrus@Austlit

'In any Australian bookshop oriented to the general public, as in Britain and the USA, fantasy books for children and young adults have gained huge increase in shelf space over the past decade; enough fantasy books for these age groups have been published each year in Australia to begin to justify a division on the shelves between realist and fantasy (and, more recently, another division between fantasy and the paranormal) Australian fiction. Fantasy for these age groups ia a major selling category, and the categories for the Aurealis Awards (the premier Australian award for speculative fiction) have been progressively expanded, in the case of children's literature, to five. Fantasy for these age groups is thus a major sector of the Australian market. The ferocity of competition for substantial awards, both monetary and in terms of literary prizes, perhaps explains why some fantasy authors for children and young adults are in the forefront of Australian literary marketing in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Garth Nix being among the most successful in the field. (Authors introduction 67)