Jasper Jones Author Craig Silvey Jailed for Seven Months

Craig Silvey is going to jail. The author of Jasper Jones and Runt got seven months from a Perth judge on Monday, November 2, for possessing and distributing child exploitation material, ABC News reported from the WA District Court. He's 44. He'd pleaded guilty to both charges earlier in the year.

His time runs from October 22, the day he was taken into custody, and he can apply for parole, according to the BBC. For comparison, the ABC noted, distribution carries up to ten years and possession up to seven.

What the court heard

Detectives searched his Fremantle home in January and took his phone and laptop. The court heard there were five videos and two images of child abuse on the laptop and five more images on the phone, and the BBC reported that his chats about it were open on screen when police arrived. The user he'd been messaging, met through an adult site, was "fictitious," Judge Hayley Cormann said, the ABC reported.

He'd faced four charges. In May, with guilty pleas in on two, the prosecution let go of the producing and further-possession counts, according to SBS News.

Cormann didn't soften it. She called the material and his messages "repulsive" and "degrading." The children in those files are real, she said, and they get re-victimised every time someone passes the material on. SBS quoted her telling him he had "devastated and betrayed the trust of thousands of people."

She gave him some credit, too. He was sorry, she accepted. He'd pleaded guilty early and probably won't do it again. What she wouldn't buy was his lawyer's claim that he had no sexual interest in children.

Prosecutor Daniel Harrop brought up the readers. Lots of kids, he said, "particularly vulnerable children grappling with questions of gender identity and sexuality," had found comfort and safety in the teenagers Silvey wrote about.

The books

Few Australian novelists sold like him. Jasper Jones came out in 2009 and has moved over 600,000 copies around the world, by the ABC's count. It was Book of the Year at the 2010 awards run by the country's peak publishing body, the BBC said, and made the Miles Franklin and International Dublin shortlists. Toni Collette and Hugo Weaving were in the 2017 movie. There was a stage version as well.

Honeybee came next, in 2020, and that was a bestseller too. Runt, the 2022 kids' book, hit cinemas in 2024. Teachers had been putting Jasper Jones and his debut Rhubarb in front of high schoolers for years.

Not anymore. Allen & Unwin and Fremantle Press, which put out Rhubarb, quit promoting his work after the charges, SBS reported, and most of his titles dropped off reading lists across Australia. In court his lawyer, Eloise Barker, said he'd lost his publishing contracts and his books had been taken out of shops and school curriculums.

And in Western Australia that won't be undone. Education Minister Sabine Winton has confirmed that the temporary ban on his books as texts in state schools is now permanent, the ABC reported.