CQUniversity alumnus and former award-winning journalist Barry Levy confronts some of the most heart-wrenching issues that are affecting Australian teens in a new novel titled As If!.

Set between the fringe town of Ipswich and affluent Brisbane in Queensland, Barry gives life to some colourful characters that find themselves entrenched in a world of alcohol, drugs and vandalism, and reminded by the hurts of the past.

Bringing comfort and support to the teens is a shelter supervisor, Ruth Hannah, who also has her own past to contend with and the Juvenile Aid Bureau's Senior Detective Constable Watno Thornes who lives with a dark agenda in the back of his head.

The scenes and the characters from this novel extend from Levy's journalism experiences.

"As If! is based on stories of poverty and youth homelessness I did mainly for The Morning Bulletin and The Queensland Times. The stories were written some years ago, around and just after the time of the Burdekin Report into Homelessness," Levy explains.

"However, having followed the issue in the media and through friends involved in youth work since then, what I have found is that nothing has changed; in fact the issue of homelessness in Australia has only grown worse, with current figures showing it has more than doubled over 20 years.

"The issue just became too hard for me to ignore over the years, and with all the research I had done and my interests in literature, it became an ideal topic for my fiction writing.

"I only hope that there are people out there who take the book seriously enough both in a literary sense and to use it as a model to see into the problem of youth homelessness - and perhaps actually use it as a tool to help people with."

In 1986, Levy won the Anning Barton Memorial Award for Outstanding Journalism (Central Queensland) - for a series of freelance articles on child sex abuse (incest-rape). Then in 1991 he won an Australian Human Rights Award for Journalism for a multiple series of stories on child sex abuse, homelessness, and domestic violence. Also in 1991 he was a Queensland State finalist for the Walkley Awards for a series on homelessness.

Author Barry LevyLevy worked in the print media in South Africa from 1974. He reported for the Sunday Express, Sunday Times and Rand Daily Mail. He was also the managing editor of Drum magazine for 2 years before coming to Australia. The magazine had a mainly black readership of around one and half million and was recently the subject of an international film called Drum.

After coming to Australia, Levy worked for the Daily Sun as a sub editor, before going to CQUniversity to study an Arts degree in Literature, History and Communications.

Levy said he has very fond memories of the ‘friendly, non pretentious' CQUniversity campus in Rockhampton.

"I was especially influenced in my view of literature and even my current writing, years later, by 2 exceptional lecturers [from CQUniversity]: Wally Woods and the late David Myers. Having studied at 3 university campuses (Wits University in South Africa, CQUniversity and UQ), they remain standout lecturers, Wally with his symbolic and metaphorical approach to literature and David with his much more social approach."

Levy later taught high school for only 6 months - "all praise to the good teachers of this world" - and went back into journalism working for The Queensland Times.

Since 1996 he has been the publications officer for the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre (QTAC), although he has now dropped back his work program with QTAC to concentrate more on his creative writing and is currently busy working on 2 novels.

As If! is available through the CQUniversity Bookshop or can be ordered from all bookshops, Amazon, or directly from publisher Interactive Press. The cost of the book is $30.