Popular Australian children's author jailed over child exploitation offences
The author of Jasper Jones and Runt pleaded guilty in May after police raided his home months earlier.
Popular Australian children’s author jailed over child exploitation offences
Australian children’s author Craig Silvey has been sentenced to seven months in jail for possessing and distributing child exploitation material.
When delivering the sentence, Judge Hayley Cormann described Silvey’s conduct as “repulsive” and “degrading”.
Silvey was arrested in January after police raided his home in Western Australia and seized several electronic devices. In May, the 44-year-old pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child exploitation material, and in October he was jailed while awaiting sentencing.
“You have devastated and betrayed the trust of thousands of people, and you’ve let entire communities down,” Cormann said on Monday, according to WA Today.
Police said Silvey had online chats about child exploitation open when they arrived to search his house.
In those chats, the court heard, Silvey described himself as “extremely open minded” and “obsessed with taboos”.
He discussed his sexual interest in children as young as five with another user of a pornography site, and detectives found images and videos of other adults abusing children on his devices.
He was originally charged with four offences, but prosecutors later withdrew two.
Prosecutors said Silvey helped fuel the “cycle of abuse” victimising the children in the images, and argued that a severe sentence was necessary.
But the author’s defence lawyer said he did not have a “sexual interest in children” and was seeking out the “most depraved material” as a form of “emotional” self-harm.
“His behaviour provided temporary relief from psychological agitation,” Eloise Barker said.
She said Silvey had shown genuine remorse for his offending, and that his public profile and the resulting media attention — which led to his former partner and children moving interstate — was already a punishment in itself.
Judge Cormann rejected many of those arguments and said Silvey’s offending was extremely serious.
“These children, the victims of this type of offending, are real and are traumatised… the consequences for them from these abuses are long lasting and very, very traumatic,” she said, according to The Australian.
Silvey was sentenced to seven months in jail, backdated to 22 October. He is eligible for parole.
Silvey’s coming-of-age novel Jasper Jones sold more than half a million copies and won the Book of the Year Award from the nation’s peak publishing body in 2010.
Set in Western Australia and centred on two teenage boys, the novel was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Awards and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
It was later adapted into a 2017 film starring Toni Collette and Hugo Weaving, as well as a stage play.
Another of his well-regarded works is 2022’s Runt, about the adventures of an 11-year-old girl and her stray dog, set in the Australian outback. It was also made into a film in 2024, featuring Celeste Barber.
Since his arrest, publishers and bookshops have removed his works from shelves, while schools in some states have taken Jasper’s books off teaching lists.