| |
|
 The Margaret A. Edwards Award for
Outstanding Literature For Young Adults is awarded by the Young Adult Library Services Association
of the American Library Association. It is
given to an author for lifetime achievement in writing for teenager, whose work
helps teenagers to better understand themselves and their world. Click on the
author’s name or titles to view the Library's online catalog.
View all Teens Booklists.
|
| |
| 2007 -- Lowis
Lowry |
|
Lois Lowry's "The
Giver," published by Walter Lorraine Books/Houghton Mifflin Company,
explores a future where differences have been erased and strict rules govern
society. The novel tells the story of Jonas, a young man designated as the new
Receiver of Memory for his community. Little by little, Lowry reveals what is
absent from Jonas’ life: color, pain, love. Readers, along with Jonas,
discover that lack of freedom is too heavy a price to pay for security.
|
| |
| 2006 --
Jacqueline Woodson |
Jacqueline Woodson’s sensitive and lyrical books reveal
and give a voice to outsiders often invisible to mainstream America. "
I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This,” and its sequel, “Lena,”
tell a story of interracial friendship with no pat solutions to the problems of
race, class, abandonment and abuse, while a compassionate community offers hope
and support. A young boy records his fears that his mother’s new lesbian
relationship will change their family bond in “From the
Notebooks of Melanin Sun.” First love, tender and fragile, flowers for
Ellie and Jeremiah, even as the pressure and prejudice of society work against
them in “If You
Come Softly.” Preserving family is at the heart of “Miracle’s
Boys,” as three very different brothers struggle to move beyond grief
and loss to forge a bond strong enough to prevail against poverty, anger and the
lure of the streets.
|
| |
| 2005 --
Francesca Lia Block |
| Francesca Lia Block encourages teens to celebrate their own
true selves, helping them discover what time they are upon and where they do
belong. Her books, Weetzie
Bat (1989),
Witch Baby (1991),
Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys (1992),
Missing Angel Juan (1993), and
Baby Be-Bop (1996), deal with the complex issues such as blended families,
the many types of love, and the sometimes heartbreaking real world challenges
teenagers face. |
| 2004 --
Ursula K. Le Guin |
| Ursula K. Le Guin is perhaps best known for the young adult
fantasy series Earthsea:
A Wizard of Earthsea, originally published in 1968,
The Tombs of Autuan (1971),
The Farthest Shore (1972) and
Tehanu (1990). "In her writing, as in her life, Ms. LeGuin takes on issues
arising from the effort to live humanely in the natural world, exploring the
tension between individuality and social norms," said [Edwards] Award Committee
Chair Francisca Goldsmith. "In the Earthsea fantasy series, young protagonists
mature not only physically, but also spiritually, as Ms. LeGuin's real world
readers must in order to navigate young adulthood." |
| 2003 --
Nancy Garden |
| Nancy Garden has made numerous contributions to young adult
literature during her career. Her book
Annie on My Mind is the bittersweet story of two young women who fall in love
and was the book recognized by the Margaret A. Edwards Award committee. Born in
Boston, Massachusetts, Garden spent her childhood moving frequently with her
family. These experiences led to her interest in reading and storytelling.
Garden's books are cited for their ability to help students feel more at ease
with difficult and sometimes controversial issues. |
| 2002 -- Paul Zindel |
| Paul Zindel is a best-selling author of young adult works who
has pioneered the genre’s break with romanticism toward a more realistic
mode. Zindel’s characters are often desperately unhappy. His stories do not
have tidy endings or shallow platitudes about a perfect world. Quite the
contrary: Zindel deals honestly with loneliness, eccentricity, escapism, sexual
tension, and drug and alcohol abuse. As Theodore W. Hipple puts it in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography, the author has produced “a steady
stream of novels that explore teenagers’ lives in realistic ways.” In
Elementary English, Beverly A. Haley and Kenneth L. Donelson note that
Zindel “looks at the world through the eyes of adolescents, many kinds of
adolescents, all trying to find some meaning in a world apparently gone mad, all
concerned with man’s cruelty and ‘matters of
consequence.’” |
| 2001 -- Robert
Lipsyte |
| Lipsyte’s publications for young adults have been praised
as unsentimental books featuring characters who experience a transformation
through a combination of hard work and adherence to ethics. Not surprisingly, the
majority of the author’s books also involve aspects of athletics and,
because of his experience as a sportswriter, Lipsyte is considered an authority
in the field of children’s sports stories. As a sportswriter, Lipsyte was
an integral part of this subculture he has christened “SportsWorld,”
and his disillusionment with certain athletic conventions has thus been deemed
noteworthy. In his work SportsWorld:
An American Dreamland, Lipsyte recapitulates his career as a sportswriter,
using encounters with athletes in baseball, football, basketball, boxing, and
tennis to give examples of and validate his philosophy. |
| 2000 -- Chris
Crutcher |
| “Writing with vitality and authority that stems from
personal experience in Running Loose, Stotan!, and The
Crazy Horse Electric Game, Chris Crutcher gives readers the inside story on
young men, sports, and growing up,” writes Christine McDonnell in Horn Book
magazine. “His heroes--sensitive, reflective young men, far from
stereotypic jocks--use sports as an arena to test personal limits; to prove
stamina, integrity and identity; and to experience loyalty and cooperation as
well as competition.” |
| 1999 -- Anne
McCaffrey |
| Science-fiction’s much-heralded “Dragon
Lady,” Anne McCaffrey, resides in Ireland in a home called Dragonhold,
where she produces, among her other novels, the fantastic tales of the
dragonriders of Pern. A planet protected from deadly spores by fire-breathing
dragons and their human partners, Pern is a former colony of Earth which has lost
much of its knowledge of science and history. In such novels as Dragonflight, Dragonquest: Being the
Further Adventures of the Dragonriders of Pern, and The White
Dragon, McCaffrey presents Pern as a land in which “social structure,
tensions, legends, and traditions are all based on the fundamental ecological
battle [against the ‘Thread’ spores] and on the empathetic kinship
between dragon and rider,” Debra Rae Cohen comments in
Crawdaddy. |
| 1998 -- Madeleine
L’Engle |
| Madeleine L’Engle is a writer who resists easy
classification. She has successfully published plays, poems, essays,
autobiography, and novels for both children and adults. She is probably best
known for her “Time Fantasy” series of children’s books: A Wrinkle in
Time, A
Wind in the Door, A Swiftly
Tilting Planet, and Many Waters. These
novels combine elements of science fiction and fantasy with L’Engle’s
constant themes of Christian faith, family love, and moral responsibility. |
| 1997 -- Gary
Paulsen |
| Now a prolific author of coming-of-age stories, novels, and
how-to books aimed at a younger audience, Paulsen has also written nonfiction
works on such topics as hunting, trapping, farming, animals, medicine, sports,
and outdoor life. Paulsen trapped and hunted as a youth and ran the Iditarod (a
1200-mile Alaska dogsled race) in 1983, and the subjects of most of his books
reflect this experience with the wilderness. Tracker, for instance,
tells the story of a thirteen- year-old boy who must hunt alone for the first
time to put meat on the table. Paulsen describes the spiritual relationship that
develops between the hunter and his prey and how the deer’s acceptance of
death helps the boy come to terms with his grandfather’s imminent death. Dogsong is a story of a
boy’s coming of age on the northern tundra. Eugene J. Lineham in Best
Sellers praises Paulsen’s writing style, noting: “There is poetic
majesty in the descriptions without a touch of condescension to the
young.” |
| 1996 -- Judy Blume |
| In the nearly thirty years since she published her first book,
Judy Blume has become one of the most popular and controversial authors for
children writing today. Her accessible, humorous style and direct, sometimes
explicit treatment of youthful concerns have won her many fans--as well as
critics who sometimes seek to censor her work. Nevertheless, Blume has continued
to produce works that are both entertaining and thought-provoking. “Judy
Blume has a knack for knowing what children think about and an honest, highly
amusing way of writing about it,” Jean Van Leeuwen states in the New
York Times Book Review. Newsweek likewise reports that Angeline Moscatt, head
librarian of the Children’s Room of the New York Library, believes Blume
“has a way of portraying human foibles in a way kids can relate to. In
twenty years, I’ve never seen such a popular children’s
author.” |
| 1995 -- Cynthia
Voigt |
| Since her first young-adult novel, Homecoming, appeared
in 1981, Cynthia Voigt has had more than a dozen books published and has received
the prestigious Newbery Medal for Homecoming’s sequel, Dicey’s Song.
In a Voigt novel, notes Washington Post Book World contributing critic
Alice Digilio, the author “never takes sides in the war of generations.
Instead she promotes understanding between adults and children, and she values
the efforts of children, as well as those of adults, to appreciate the
other’s point of view.” |
| 1994 -- Walter Dean
Myers |
| Walter Dean Myers is commonly recognized as one of modern
literature’s premier authors of fiction for young African-American and
black people. Two of his novels for teens, The Young
Landlords and Motown and Didi: A
Love Story, have won the prestigious Coretta Scott King Award, and his text
for the picture book Where Does the
Day Go? received the Council on Interracial Books for Children Award in 1969.
As Carmen Subryan notes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography,
“Whether he is writing about the ghettos of New York, the remote countries
of Africa, or social institutions, Myers captures the essence of the developing
experiences of youth.” |
| 1993 -- M.E. Kerr (Marijane
Meaker) |
| Marijane Meaker explains in an essay for Something About the
Author Autobiography Series that it was the combination of reading Paul
Zindel and teaching writing classes at Commercial Manhattan Central High School
that prompted her to try writing for the young adult audience. Until then, Meaker
had been spending most of her time writing suspense stories under the pseudonym
Vin Packer and
nonfiction under her own name and the pseudonym Ann Aldrich. In
her autobiographical essay, Meaker discusses the publication of her first young
adult novel, Dinky
Hocker Shoots Smack!: “Since I love pseudonyms,” says Meaker,
“I decided to call myself M. E. Kerr, a play on my last name,
Meaker.” When the book was actually successful, Meaker decided to take a
second look at the category of young adult fiction. |
| 1992 -- Lois Duncan |
| Lois Duncan’s young adult novels of suspense and the
supernatural have made her a favorite of adult critics and young readers alike.
According to Times Literary Supplement reviewer Jennifer Moody, Duncan is
“popular ... not only with the soft underbelly of the literary world, the
children’s book reviewers, but with its most hardened carapace, the teenage
library book borrower.” “Duncan understands the teenage world and its
passionate concerns with matters as diverse as dress, death, romance, school,
self-image, sex and problem parents,” Times Literary Supplement
contributor Sarah Hayes notes. But while other writers for young adults show life
in a humorous, optimistic light, the critic explains, “Duncan suggests that
life is neither as prosaic nor as straightforward as it seems at first.” As
a result, Leigh Dean comments in the Children’s Book Review Service,
Duncan’s readers look for “unconventional characters, and situations
steeped in danger, magic, and intrigue.” |
| 1991 -- Robert
Cormier |
| Robert Cormier is widely acclaimed for his powerful and
disturbing novels for young adult readers, though his realistic subject
matter--including murder, sex, and terminal illness--has at times made his work
controversial. His novels, which include The Chocolate
War and I Am
the Cheese, often involve teenage protagonists faced with difficult,
uncompromising situations. “A lot of people underestimate that intelligent
teenager out there,” Cormier noted in an interview for Authors and
Artists for Young Adults. “These kids today, I’m talking about
the sensitive, intelligent kid, are really far ahead of a lot of adults. They
have been exposed to so much. Anybody who writes down to these people is making a
mistake.” |
| 1990 -- Richard
Peck |
| Richard Peck’s books on such important teen-age problems
as suicide, unwanted pregnancy, death of a loved one, and rape have won critical
acclaim for their realism and emotional power. Peck has written over a dozen very
popular books for young adults, books that assist young readers in the
development of self-confidence. He has also written adult novels that show a
commitment to eliminating sexual stereotypes. When writing for young adults, he
told Roger Sutton in a School Library Journal interview, he tries to keep
his reader in mind: “As I’m typing I’m trying to look out over
the typewriter and see faces. I don’t certainly want to ְwrite for
myself’ because I’m trying to write across a generation gap.”
In books for both age groups, Peck told Jean F. Mercier in Publishers
Weekly, he tries to “give readers leading characters they can look up
to and reasons to believe that problems can be solved.” The excellence of
his work has been recognized by Author Achievement Award in 1990. |
| 1989 -- No Award |
| 1988 -- S.E. Hinton |
| Novelist S. E. Hinton is credited with revolutionizing the
young adult genre by portraying teenagers realistically rather than formulaically
and by creating characters, settings, and dialogue that are representative of
teenage life in America. Her classic, The Outsiders
(published in 1967 when she was seventeen years old), was the first in her short
but impressive list of books to feature troubled but sensitive male adolescents
as protagonists. Hinton’s subjects include social-class rivalry, poverty,
alcoholism, drug addiction, and the cruelty teenagers often inflict on each other
and on themselves. Film rights to all five of her novels have been acquired, and
four have been adapted as major motion pictures. |
