Tamora Pierce is an American writer of fantasy fiction for teenagers, known best for stories featuring young heroines. She made a name for herself with her first book series, The Song of the Lioness (1983–1988), which followed the main character Alanna through the trials and triumphs of training as a knight.
Alex Sánchez is a Mexican American author of award-winning novels for teens and adults. His first novel, Rainbow Boys (2001), was selected by the American Library Association (ALA), as a Best Book for Young Adults. Subsequent books have won additional awards, including the Lambda Literary Award. Although Sanchez's novels are widely accepted in thousands of school and public libraries in America, they have faced a handful of challenges and efforts to ban them. In Webster, New York, removal of Rainbow Boys from the 2006 summer reading list was met by a counter-protest from students, parents, librarians, and community members resulting in the book being placed on the 2007 summer reading list.
John Marsden is an Australian writer and school principal. Marsden's books have been translated into eleven languages.
Charles de Lint is a Canadian writer of Dutch origins. He is married to—and plays music with—MaryAnn Harris.
Gordon Korman is a Canadian American author. Korman has written over 80 children's and young adult fiction books. Korman has sold more than 28 million books over a career spanning four decades and has appeared at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Wintersmith is a comic fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, set in the Discworld and written with younger readers in mind. It is labelled a "Story of Discworld" to indicate its status as children's or young adult fiction, unlike most of the books in the Discworld series. Published on 21 September 2006, it is the third novel in the series to feature the character of Tiffany Aching. It received recognition as a 2007 Best Book for Young Adults from the American Library Association.
David Almond FRSL is a British author who has written several novels for children and young adults from 1998, each one receiving critical acclaim.
Allan Stratton is a Canadian playwright and novelist.
Scott David Westerfeld is an American writer of young adult fiction, best known as the author of the Uglies and the Leviathan series.
Black Swan Green is a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman written by David Mitchell. It was published in April 2006 in the U.S. and May 2006 in the UK. The novel's thirteen chapters each represent one month—from January 1982 through January 1983—in the life of 13-year-old Worcestershire boy Jason Taylor. The novel is written from the perspective of Taylor and employs many teen colloquialisms and popular-culture references from early-1980s England.
Todd Strasser is an American writer of more than 140 young-adult and middle grade novels and many short stories and works of non-fiction, some written under the pen names Morton Rhue and T.S. Rue.
Libba Bray is an American writer of young adult novels including the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Going Bovine, and The Diviners.
Markus Zusak is an Australian writer of German origin. He is best known for The Book Thief and The Messenger, two novels for young adults which became international bestsellers. He won the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2014 for his contributions to young-adult literature published in the United States.
Margo Lanagan is an Australian writer of short stories and young adult fiction.
Edward William Bloor is an American novelist and playwright, best known for Tangerine and London Calling.
Sharon Mills Draper is an American children's writer and a professional educator, the 1997 National Teacher of the Year. She is a five-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for books about the African-American experience. She may be known best for the Hazelwood and Jericho series and for her historical novel Copper Sun. Other books include Double Dutch, Out of My Mind and Romiette and Julio, and Stella by Starlight. Draper won the Margaret A. Edwards Award from American Library Association in 2015. The annual award recognizes one writer and a particular body of work for "significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature". The judges cited six novels that were published from 1994 to 2007: Tears of a Tiger, Forged by Fire, and Darkness Before Dawn ; The Battle of Jericho, November Blues, and Copper Sun.
The Rules of Survival is a 2006 novel written by Nancy Werlin. It depicts the story of a boy and his two siblings trying to survive vicious emotional and physical abuse by their mother, Nikki. This book was a National Book Award finalist. It also received recognition as a 2007 Best Book for Young Adults from the American Library Association.
Dreamhunter (2005) and Dreamquake (2007) are two fantasy novels, written by New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox. The former title was nominated for Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2006, and was an American Library Association best book of 2007. Dreamquake received recognition as an Honor Book for the Michael L. Printz Award in 2008. The U.K. title of Dreamhunter is The Rainbow Opera.
The Alex Awards annually recognize "ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults ages 12 through 18". Essentially, the award is a listing by the American Library Association parallel to its annual Best Books for Young Adults, a longer list of recommended books that have been promoted in the YA category. YALSA also names several other "Top Tens" annually.
The Hoopster (2005) is a novel by American author Alan Lawrence Sitomer. It's the first book in the Hoopster Trilogy.
