Craig Silvey, one of Australia's most celebrated children's and young adult authors, has been sentenced to seven months in jail after pleading guilty to possessing and distributing child exploitation material.

The 44-year-old father of three was sentenced on Monday by Judge Hayley Cormann in the Western Australian District Court. The sentence was backdated to 22 October, and Silvey is eligible for parole.

Silvey was arrested in January after police raided his home in Fremantle, Western Australia, seizing several electronic devices including a laptop and mobile phone. Officers found numerous category one images and videos of children being abused. At the time of the raid, police said Silvey had online chats discussing child exploitation open on his devices.

He pleaded guilty to two charges in May. Two additional charges of producing and possessing further child exploitation material were dropped by prosecutors at the same time. He was held in custody pending sentencing from October.

Court documents revealed Silvey had engaged in online conversations with another user on a pornography website, where his handle was Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. The pair later moved to an encrypted messaging app. In those messages, Silvey described himself as "extremely open-minded and obsessed with taboos" and made explicit statements about his sexual interest in young children, including boys as young as five. He wrote that "eight was the perfect age" and stated "I want to make out with little ones."

Prosecutors argued that Silvey had contributed to the "cycle of abuse" victimising the children depicted in the material and called for a harsh sentence.

Judge Cormann described his actions as "repulsive" and "degrading." She said the offending was extremely serious and deeply disturbing.

"This offending involves children and it is destructive and it is devastating," she said.

"These children, the victims of this type of offending, are real and are traumatised. The consequences for them from these abuses are long lasting and very, very traumatic," she added.

"You have devastated and betrayed the trust of thousands of people, and you've let entire communities down," Cormann said.

The defence argued that Silvey did not have a genuine sexual interest in children and had been seeking out extreme material as a form of emotional self-harm. Defence lawyer Eloise Barker said his behaviour "provided temporary relief from psychological agitation" and that he had displayed genuine remorse. She also argued that the intense media scrutiny, which led to his former partner and children relocating interstate, already constituted a form of punishment.

Judge Cormann did not accept many of those arguments.

Silvey is best known for his 2009 coming-of-age novel Jasper Jones, widely regarded as a modern Australian classic. The book sold more than half a million copies and won the Book of the Year Award from Australia's peak publishing body in 2010. It was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, and was adapted into a feature film starring Toni Collette and Hugo Weaving in 2017, as well as several stage productions.

His other works include Rhubarb, and Honeybee, which won the Australian Indie Book Award in 2021. His children's novel Runt, about an 11-year-old girl and her stray dog set in the Australian outback, was published in 2022 and adapted into a film in 2024 featuring Celeste Barber.

Following his arrest, publishers Allen & Unwin and Fremantle Press stopped promoting his books. Most of his titles were removed from reading lists across the country, and schools in some states removed Jasper Jones from teaching curricula. Bookshops also pulled his works from shelves.