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Children's Literature Guide

Guide for children's literature awards winners

About the Award

This award, established in 1936 in honor of Andrew Carnegie, is given for recognition of an outstanding book for children written in English and first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. Note: Since 2007 the year relates to when the medal was awarded. Previously the year refers to the publication date of the books. For more information visit: https://www.ala.org/rusa/awards/carnegie-medals/about

A listing of Carnegie Medal Award Winners housed in the Curriculum Materials/Media Center is below. These are organized according to the Library of Congress system of classification.  

Award Winners

Date Title/ Author and Illustrator Call Number
2024 The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters Not in collection
2023

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

The swimmers are unknown to each other except through their private routines (slow lane, fast lane), and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world. One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. For Alice, the pool was a final stand against the darkness of her encroaching dementia. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese American incarceration camp in which she spent the war. Alice's estranged daughter, reentering her mother's life too late, witnesses her devastating decline.

PS3615.T88 S95 2022
2022 October, October by Katya Balen
Not in collection
2021

Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks by Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds conjures ten tales (one per block) about what happens after the dismissal bell rings, and weaves them into one funny, poignant look at the detours we face on the walk home, and in life.

PZ7.R33593 Loo 2019
2020

Lark by Anthony McGowan

Things are getting tense at home for Nicky and Kenny as they wait for a visit from their estranged mum. To escape, they go for a walk on the moors, taking their little Jack Russell terrier with them. But what should have been a laugh, a lark, turns deadly when the weather changes and they are caught in a blizzard. Nothing will ever be quite the same again ...

PR6113.C47644 L37 2019
2019

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours her frustration onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers - especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class. With Mami's determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. When she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she knows that she could never get around Mami's rules to attend, much less speak her words out loud. But still, she can't stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in spite of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent. 

PZ7.5.A35 Po 2018
2018

Where the World Ends by Geraldine McCaughrean; illustrated by Jane Milloy

Every time a lad came fowling on the stacs, he went home less of a boy and more of a man. (If he went home at all, that is.) Every summer, Quill and his friends are put ashore on a remote sea stac to hunt birds. But this summer, no one arrives to take them home. Surely nothing but the end of the world can explain why they've been abandoned - cold, starving, and clinging to life in the grip of a murderous ocean. How will they survive such a forsaken place of stone and sea? Geraldine McCaughrean's first young-adult novel since the Michael L. Printz Award-winning The White Darkness is an extraordinary story of fortitude, endurance, tragedy, and survival, set against an unforgettable backdrop of savage beauty.

PR6113.C33 W44 2019
2017

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

Winter 1945. Four refugees. Four secrets. Each one born of a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted, by tragedy, lies, war. As thousands desperately flock to the coast in the midst of a Soviet advance, four paths converge, vying for passage aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship that promises safety and freedom. But not all promises can be kept.

PZ7.S47 S25 2017
2016

One by Sarah Crossan

Despite problems at home, sixteen-year-old conjoined twins Tippi and Grace are loving going to school for the first time and making real friends when they learn that a cardiac problem will force them to have separation surgery, which they have never before considered. Grace and Tippi. Tippi and Grace. Two sisters. Two hearts. Two dreams. Two lives. But one body. Grace and Tippi are conjoined twins, joined at the waist, defying the odds of survival for sixteen years. They share everything, and they are everything to each other. They would never imagine being apart. For them, that would be the real tragedy., But something is happening to them. Something they hoped would never happen. And Grace doesn't want to admit it. not even to Tippi. How long can they hide from the truth--how long before they must face the most impossible choice of their lives?

PZ7.5.C76 One 2015
2015

Buffalo Soldier by Tanya Landman

What kind of a girl steals the clothes from a dead man's back and runs off to join the army? A desperate one. That's who. At the end of the American Civil War, Charley - a young African-American slave from the deep south - is ostensibly freed. But then her adopted mother is raped and lynched at the hands of a mob and Charley is left alone. In a terrifyingly lawless land, where the colour of a person's skin can bring violent death, Charley disguises herself as a man and joins the army. Soon she's being sent to the prairies to fight a whole new war against the 'savage Indians'. Trapped in a world of injustice and inequality, it's only when Charley is posted to Apache territory that she begins to learn what it is to be truly free.

PR6112.A537 B84 2014
2014

The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks

Sixteen-year-old Linus Weems, a street person since leaving his wealthy father's home, is kidnapped and taken to an underground bunker where he's soon joined by five others, ranging in age from nine to seventy, who are alternately cared for and tortured by their unseen captor.

PZ7.B7965 BUN 2015
2013

Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner

An unlikely teenager risks all to expose the truth about a heralded moon landing. What if the football hadn't gone over the wall. On the other side of the wall there is a dark secret. And the devil. And the Moon Man. And the Motherland doesn't want anyone to know. But Standish Treadwell--who has different-colored eyes, who can't read, can't write, Standish Treadwell isn't bright--sees things differently than the rest of the "train-track thinkers." So when Standish and his only friend and neighbor, Hector, make their way to the other side of the wall, they see what the Motherland has been hiding. And it's big.

PZ7 .G179335 MAG 2013X
2012

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness; illustrated by Jim Kay

Thirteen-year-old Connor awakes one night to find a monster outside his bedroom window, but not the one from the recurring nightmare that began when his mother became ill--an ancient, wild creature that wants him to face truth and loss.

PS3614.E498 M65 2013

2011

Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness

As a world-ending war surges to life around them, Todd and Viola face monstrous decisions, questioning all they have ever known as they try to step back from the darkness and find the best way to achieve peace.

PZ7 .N43843 MON 2010

2010

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.

PZ7 .G1273 GR 2008

2009

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd

In 1981, the height of Ireland's "Troubles," eighteen-year-old Fergus is distracted from his upcoming A-level exams by his imprisoned brother's hunger strike, the stress of being a courier for Sinn Fein, and dreams of a murdered girl whose body he discovered in a bog.

PZ7 .D7538 BOG 2008

2008

Here Lies Arthur by Phillip Reeve

When her village is attacked and burned, Gwyna seeks protection from the bard Myrddin, who uses Gwyna in his plan to transform young Arthur into the heroic King Arthur.

PZ7.R25576 HE 2008

2007

Just In Case by Meg Rosoff

Convinced that fate is out to get him, fifteen-year-old David Case assumes a new identity in the hope of avoiding what he believes is certain doom.

PZ7 .R71957 JUS 2006

2005

Tamar by Mal Peet

When her grandfather dies, Tamar inherits a box containing a series of clues and coded messages. Out of the past, another Tamar emerges, a man involved in the terrifying world of resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Holland half a century before.

PZ7 .P3564 TA 2006

2004

Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce

After their mother dies, two brothers find a huge amount of money which they must spend quickly before England switches to the new European currency, but they disagree on what to do with it.

PZ7.C82963 MI 2004

2003

A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly

Not in collection

2002

Ruby Holler by Sharon Creech

Thirteen-year-old fraternal twins Dallas and Florida have grown up in a terrible orphanage but their lives change forever when an eccentric but sweet older couple invites them each on an adventure, beginning in an almost magical place called Ruby Holler.

PZ7.C8615 RU 2002

2001

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

The Amazing Maurice is a talking cat, who leads his Educated Rodents, a group of talking rats, as they go from town to town being a plague so that their accomplice, a boy piper, can "lure them all away" from the town, after which they share the money the piper makes.

PR6066.R34 A73 2001

2000

The Other Side of Truth by Beverly Naidoo

Smuggled out of Nigeria after their mother's murder, Sade and her younger brother are abandoned in London when their uncle fails to meet them at the airport and they are fearful of their new surroundings and of what may have happened to their journalist father back in Nigeria.

PZ7.N1384 OT 2001