Yvonne Winer was born in South Africa and spent her childhood on a South African farm. It was here that she was first introduced to the songs, chants and story telling of the African people. Her interest in story telling and story writing was fostered further during her training as a nursery school teacher in Johannesburg during the 1950s.
She moved to Australia in 1961 and has three children, Kari, Sydney and Michael, and one grandchild, Bonnie Amelia.
Yvonne was head of Early Childhood at the University of Southern Queensland from 1983 to 1997. She returned to South Africa in the 1990s to complete her PhD at Pretoria University where story telling and creating books became central to literacy programs she implemented in South African farm nursery schools for Xhosa and Ndebele children. She pursued the idea of creating books in the vernacular as a consultant for UNICEF in the Pacific and has more recently been invited to help create books for children for early childhood teachers in Vanuatu, as well as early childhood programs in Malaysia.
Yvonne has published many books. These include the big format books for shared reading experiences for Era publications and Scholastic. Mr Brown’s Magnificent Apple Tree (Scholastic) was actually one of the very first ‘big books’. Other books include a series of Fingerplay and Action Rhymes (Belair) and also Teacher Resource books (Longman).
More recently she has written picture storybooks and junior novels for Margaret Hamilton Books. Spiders Spin Webs, illustrated by Karen Lloyd Jones, was the recipient of the Wilderness Society Environment Award for Children's Literature in 1997. In the same year Nananka, illustrated by Marianne Yamagutchi, was acknowledged as a Notable Book by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. Butterflies Fly, illustrated by Karen Lloyd Jones, was launched in Perth in 2000.
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