Bugs and Beasts: ABC, An Alphabet Book from the National Library of Australia

by Irma Gold

Published by the National Library of Australia. Take a journey with us through the alphabet and discover the wild, cheeky and delightful bugs and beasts that are hiding in the National Library of Australia. You'll find everything from dinosaurs, whales and tigers to unicorns, fireflies and spiders. Young readers will learn the alphabet while exploring the Library's diverse collections. And don't forget to test your knowledge with the fun facts that accompany each creature. Find out why vultures vomit at their attackers, how iguanas use their tails as weapons, and which animal has a heart the size of a small car.

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Irma Gold is an Australian author, editor and reader. Her debut novel, The Breaking, won the NSW Writers Centre Varuna Fellowship and was awarded development grants by artsACT and CAPO. It won a Canberra Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted (then Highly Commended) in the ACT Notable Awards.

Irma’s critically acclaimed debut collection of short fiction, Two Steps Forward (Affirm Press), was shortlisted for or won a number of awards. Irma’s short fiction has been widely published in journals, including Meanjin, Westerly, Island, Review of Australian Fiction and Going Down Swinging, and in anthologies like Australian Love Stories edited by Cate Kennedy, and the tenth anniversary edition of Award Winning Australian Writing 2017.

Irma is also the author of five picture books for children, most recently Where the Heart Is, featured on Sarah Ferguson’s Storytime channel, and Seree’s Story.

For 24 years Irma has worked as an editor, and for a decade she was Convener of Editing at the University of Canberra. She is the commissioning editor of a number of anthologies, including The Sound of Silence, winner of the ACT Writing and Publishing Awards for Nonfiction, and The Invisible Thread, an official publication of the National Year of Reading 2012 and the Centenary of Canberra 2013 which anthologises a century of literature by writers who have called Canberra home, including Alex Miller, Marion Halligan, Roger McDonald, Kate Grenville, Omar Musa, Judith Wright and Les Murray.

Irma spent her childhood living in a beautiful old Tudor house in south-east England just down the road from Roald Dahl, and now lives by the beach in Naarm/Melbourne with two boys and a little black cat.

She is just a bit keen on travel, elephants, beaches, good coffee, jumping castles and sunshiny days. She is not at all keen on extreme heights, spiders and zoos. She is Co-host with Karen Viggers of the writing podcast, Secrets from the Green Room. Her name is pronounced Ear-ma.