As of the time of my writing The Bone Sparrow, any person who enters Australia by boat without a valid visa gets placed into a detention center for an indefinite amount of time. What has changed however, are the policies about who gets put in the centers and for how long. How did you first learn about the detention centers for the Rohingya? How long have they been in place in Australia?Īustralia has had immigration detention centers for a long time now. The Q&A with author Zana Fraillon is presented below to help get the discussion started.

The full guide for your classroom or library, including Common Core guidelines and discussion questions about THE BONE SPARROW, is available FOR FREE RIGHT HERE. In the accompanying educator’s guide, the author was able to shed light into how she first learned of the very real plight of the Rohingya, and how her research helped shape this unforgettable story. As Subhi grows, his imagination threatens to burst beyond the limits of the fences that contain him. Every night, the faraway whales sing to him, the birds tell him their stories, and the magical Night Sea from his mother’s stories brings him gifts. This debut middle-grade novel tells the story of Subhi, a young Rohingya refugee born in an Australian detention center after his mother and sister fled the violence of their distant homeland. Since its release late last year, Zana Fraillon’s THE BONE SPARROW has garnered critical acclaim with starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist alongside industry awards such as the CCBC Choices 2017 list from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center and the shortlist for the Carnegie Medal in the UK.

The bone sparrow by zana fraillon