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Craig Silvey: Celebrated novelist lands in trouble for distributing child exploitation material
13th January, 2026 01:28 PM
Prize-winning Australian author Craig Silvey has appeared in court charged with possessing and distributing child exploitation material.
Silvey, best known for his novel Jasper Jones, was arrested on Monday after police raided his home in Perth. Police alleged he was actively engaging with other child exploitation offenders online when they arrived.
The 43-year-old father of three did not enter a plea during his appearance in Freemantle Magistrates Court on Tuesday and was granted bail.
Jasper Jones is regarded as an Australian classic. It has sold more than half a million copies, is often a set text in schools and was made into a film starring Toni Collette in 2017.
The book won the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year Award and was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Awards and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Another of his books, 2022 novel Runt, was also made into a film starring Celeste Barber.
The sequel, Runt and the Diabolical Dognapping, was launched at the end of last year and was Australia’s number one “best-selling children’s book” according to its publisher Allen & Unwin.
Craig Silvey is to appear in court again on 10 February.
Algerian writer facing prison
Craig court case closely follows France’s President Emmanuel Macron’s call for Algeria to free an 80-year-old writer who was sentenced on Tuesday to five years in prison, following accusations he had undermined Algeria’s territorial integrity.
Boualem Sansal was arrested in Algeria last year after apparently telling a French far-right media group that, during the colonial era, France gave too much land to Algeria and too little to Morocco.
He had also said that the disputed territory of Western Sahara was historically part of Morocco.
During his detention the French-Algerian author has spent time in hospital for ill-health.
His case has sparked a wave of support from intellectuals and politicians, including Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka, Indian-British novelist Salman Rushdie and French officials.
One conservative mayor of a Parisian suburb is promising to hand out free copies of Sansal’s books to every 18-year-old in his town, and says the author’s sentencing in Algeria is an attack on free speech.
The French president meanwhile told a news conference: “I hope there can be humanitarian decisions by the highest Algerian authorities to give him back his freedom and allow him to be treated for the disease he is fighting.”
Back in February, Macron sent a stark warning about the writer’s plight, saying “Boualem Sansal’s arbitrary detention, on top of his worrying health situation, is one of the elements that need to be settled before confidence [between our countries] can be fully restored.”
Boualem Sansal now finds himself at the centre of a deepening diplomatic row.
“He has unwillingly become a pawn in the troubled relationship between Paris and Algiers,” a committee of his supporters in France said recently.
Algeria was once a prized French colony and fought a dogged war of independence eventually winning its sovereignty in 1962.
Relations have long been strained between the two countries but reached a new low last year, when France backed Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara, where Algeria backs the Polisario group fighting for the territory’s independence.
Algiers responded to that slight by withdrawing its ambassador to Paris.
Three years earlier, Algeria severed diplomatic ties with Morocco.
Following Wednesday’s court ruling, Sansal’s lawyer pleaded to Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune to show “humanity” to the writer.
Sansal is well known for his anti-Islamist views and is an outspoken critic of the Algerian government.
His detractors say he is a darling of the far-right who appeases their prejudices.
Far-right French leader Marine Le Pen has called Sansal a “fighter for liberty and a courageous opponent of Islamism”.
His age has previously been reported as 75, but his publishers Gallimard say he is in fact 80.
Sansal’s best-known works include 2084 – a satire about religious radicalism which won the French Academy’s Grand Prix of the Francophonie a decade ago.
His next novel, Vivre, is to be published in May and tells the story of a select group of people who are chosen to colonise a new planet as Earth nears apocalypse.
