The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a prestigious literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives £50,000, as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Kathleen Wendy Herald Peyton, who wrote primarily as K. M. Peyton, was a British author of fiction for children and young adults in the 1960s and 1970s.
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson is an American writer best known for children's novels, including Bridge to Terabithia. For four different books published 1975–1980, she won two Newbery Medals and two National Book Awards. She is one of four people to win the two major international awards; for "lasting contribution to children's literature" she won the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 1998 and for her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" she won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2006, the biggest monetary prize in children's literature. Also for her body of work she was awarded the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in 2007 and the Children's Literature Legacy Award from the American Library Association in 2013. She was the second US National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, serving 2010 and 2011.
The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize or Guardian Award was a literary award that annual recognised one fiction book written for children or young adults and published in the United Kingdom. It was conferred upon the author of the book by The Guardian newspaper, which established it in 1965 and inaugurated it in 1967. It was a lifetime award in that previous winners were not eligible. At least from 2000 the prize was £1,500. The prize was apparently discontinued after 2016, though no formal announcement appears to have been made.
The International Booker Prize is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize, as the Booker Prize was then known, was announced in June 2004. Sponsored by the Man Group, from 2005 until 2015 the award was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. It rewarded one author's "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage", and was a recognition of the writer's body of work rather than any one title.
Sarah, Plain and Tall is a children's book written by Patricia MacLachlan and the winner of the 1986 Newbery Medal, the 1986 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and the 1986 Golden Kite Award. It explores themes of loneliness, abandonment, and coping with change.
The Guardian First Book Award was a literary award presented by The Guardian newspaper. It annually recognised one book by a new writer. It was established in 1999, replacing the Guardian Fiction Award or Guardian Fiction Prize that the newspaper had sponsored from 1965. The Guardian First Book Award was discontinued in 2016, with the 2015 awards being the last.
Jack Gantos is an American author of children's books. He is best known for the fictional characters Rotten Ralph and Joey Pigza. Rotten Ralph is a cat who stars in twenty picture books written by Gantos and illustrated by Nicole Rubel from 1976 to 2014. Joey Pigza is a boy with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), featured in five novels from 1998 to 2014.
Debi Gliori is a Scottish writer and illustrator of children's books.
Ally Kennen is a British author of adventure novels for children and teens. Some of her books have been marketed as thrillers and they may be classed as horror fiction.
Everything on a Waffle is a 2001 bestselling children's novel, written by Polly Horvath and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book was critically acclaimed and won a variety of awards, including the 2002 Newbery Honor. A sequel, One Year in Coal Harbour, was published in 2012.
Laura Amy Schlitz is an American author of children's literature. She is a librarian and storyteller at the Park School of Baltimore in Brooklandville, Maryland.
Norvelt is a census-designated place in Mount Pleasant Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, United States, founded in 1934 as Westmoreland Homesteads. In 1937 it was renamed to honor Eleanor Roosevelt. The community was part of the Calumet-Norvelt CDP for the 2000 census, but was split into the two separate communities of Calumet and Norvelt for the 2010 census. Calumet was a typical company town, locally referred to as a "patch" or "patch town", built by a single company to house coal miners as cheaply as possible. On the other hand, Norvelt was created during the Great Depression by the federal government of the United States as a model community, intended to increase the standard of living of laid-off coal miners. Award winning writer Jack Gantos was born in the village and wrote two books about it
Blue Willow is a realistic children's fiction book by Doris Gates, published in 1940. Called the "juvenile Grapes of Wrath", it was named a Newbery Honor book in 1941. Written by a librarian who worked with migrant children in Fresno, California, this story of a migrant girl who longs for a permanent home was considered groundbreaking in its portrayal of contemporary working-class life in America.
Adrian McKinty is a Northern Irish writer of crime and mystery novels and young adult fiction, best known for his 2020 award-winning thriller, The Chain, and the Sean Duffy novels set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. He is a winner of the Edgar Award, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, the Macavity Award, the Ned Kelly Award, the Barry Award, the Audie Award, the Anthony Award and the International Thriller Writers Award. He has been shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
When You Reach Me is a Newbery Medal-winning science fiction and mystery novel by Rebecca Stead, published in 2009. It takes place on the Upper West Side of New York during 1978 and 1979 and follows a sixth-grade girl named Miranda Sinclair. After Miranda finds a strange note, which is unsigned and addressed only to "M," in her school library book, a mystery is set into motion—one which Miranda ultimately must face alone. At the same time, Miranda juggles school, relationships with her peers, and helping her mom prepare for an upcoming appearance on The $20,000 Pyramid, a popular game show hosted by Dick Clark. Important characters in the story include Miranda's mother; Richard, her mom's good-natured boyfriend; Sal, Miranda's childhood best friend; and a homeless man who lives on Miranda's block and is referred to only as "the laughing man." Central themes in the novel include independence, redemption, and friendship.
Rebecca Stead is an American writer of fiction for children and teens. She won the American Newbery Medal in 2010, the oldest award in children's literature, for her second novel When You Reach Me.
The 2012 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 16 October 2012. A longlist of twelve titles was announced on 25 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 11 September. The jury was chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, accompanied by literary critics Dinah Birch and Bharat Tandon, historian and biographer Amanda Foreman, and Dan Stevens, actor of Downton Abbey fame with a background English Literature studies. The jury was faced with the controversy of the 2011 jury, whose approach had been seen as overly populist. Whether or not as a response to this, the 2012 jury strongly emphasised the value of literary quality and linguistic innovation as criteria for inclusion.
Joey Pigza Loses Control is a Newbery Honor book by Jack Gantos and is the sequel to Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key. This realistic fiction book was published in the year 2000 and describes the challenging life of young Joey who had attention deficit disorder.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a 2022 novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka and winner of the 2022 Booker Prize. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was published on 4 August 2022 by the small independent London publisher Sort of Books (ISBN 978-1908745903). An earlier version of the novel was originally published in the Indian subcontinent as Chats with the Dead in 2020.
