Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader.
The Carnegie Medal is a British literary award that annually recognises one outstanding new English-language book for children or young adults. It is conferred upon the author by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). CILIP calls it "the UK's oldest and most prestigious book award for children's writing".
A picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. With the narrative told primarily through text, they are distinct from comics, which do so primarily through sequential images. The images in picture books can be produced in a range of media, such as oil paints, acrylics, watercolor, and pencil. Picture books often serve as pedagogical resources, aiding with children's language development or understanding of the world.
The Kate Greenaway Medal is a British literary award that annually recognises "distinguished illustration in a book for children". It is conferred upon the illustrator by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) which inherited it from the Library Association.
Anne Evelyn Bunting , also known as Eve Bunting, is a Northern Ireland-born American writer of more than 250 books. Her work covers a broad array of subjects and includes fiction and non-fiction books. Her novels are primarily aimed at children and young adults, but she has also written the text for picture books. While many of her books are set in Northern Ireland, where she grew up, her topics and settings range from Thanksgiving to riots in Los Angeles. Bunting's first book, The Two Giants, was published in 1971. Due to the popularity of her books with children, she has been listed as one of the Educational Paperback Association's top 100 authors.
Isobelle Jane Carmody is an Australian writer of science fiction, fantasy, children's literature, and young adult literature. She is recipient of the Aurealis Award for best children's fiction.
Nina Bawden CBE, FRSL, JP was an English novelist and children's writer. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987 and the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. She is one of very few who have both served as a Booker judge and made a Booker shortlist as an author. She was a recipient of the Golden PEN Award.
Sonya Louise Hartnett is an Australian author of fiction for adults, young adults, and children. She has been called "the finest Australian writer of her generation". For her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" Hartnett won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2008, the biggest prize in children's literature.
Jeannie Baker is an English-born Australian children's picture book author and artist, known for her collage illustrations and her concern for the natural environment. Her books have won many awards.
Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Other books he has written and illustrated include The Red Tree and The Arrival.
Lauren Margot Peachy Child is an English children's author and illustrator. She is best known for the Charlie and Lola picture book series and other book series. Her influences include E. H. Shepard, Quentin Blake, Carl Larsson, and Ludwig Bemelmans.
Sally Gardner is a British children writer and illustrator. She won both the Costa Children's Book Award and the Carnegie Medal for Maggot Moon. Under her pseudonym Wray Delaney she has also written adult novels.
The Little House is a 1942 children's picture book written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it was the recipient of the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 1943.
Suzy Lee is a Korean picture-book illustrator and author. She is critically acclaimed as an artist who explores the pleasures and tensions that lie between reality and fantasy. She is also known for her remarkable achievements in the field of wordless picture books, or silent books. She gained global attention for her three works – Mirror (2003), Wave (2008), and Shadow (2010), known collectively as "The Border Trilogy" – using the center binding of the pages of a book as a means to create a narrative crossing the boundaries between reality and fantasy. Wave and Shadow were respectively named by the New York Times as Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2008 and 2010. Wave was also awarded the gold medal for Original Art by the Society of Illustrators in 2008. In 2016, Suzy Lee was shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, regarded the Nobel Prize for children's literature. Lee has received a number of other prestigious awards from around the world including the FNLIJ Award Luís Jardim for the Best Book without Text in 2008 and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Excellence in Children's Literature in 2013.
Jane Ray is an English illustrator of more than 70 children's books. The first book Jane illustrated A Balloon for Grandad written by Nigel Gray, is included in 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up. She is the writer and illustrator of some including Can You Catch a Mermaid?, Ahmed and the Feather Girl, and The Elephants Garden. She won the 1992 Nestlé Children's Book Prize in the 6- to 8-year-old readers category for the Story of the Creation, published by Orchard Books, and has been shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal several times. She was also a nominee for the Biennial of Illustration Bratislava 2017.
Margaret Wild is an Australian children's writer. She has written more than 40 books for children. Her work has been published around the world and has won several awards. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Children's Book Council of Australia in 2022.
Marita Conlon-McKenna is an Irish author of children's books and adult fiction. She is best known for her Famine-era historical children's book Under the Hawthorn Tree, the first book of the Children of the Famine trilogy, which was published in 1990 and achieved immediate success. Praised for its child-accessible yet honest depiction of the Great Famine, Under the Hawthorn Tree has been translated into over a dozen languages and is taught in classrooms worldwide. Conlon-McKenna went on to be a prolific writer and has published over 20 books for both young readers and adults. Her debut adult novel Magdalen was published in 1999.
Pamela Kay Allen is a New Zealand children's writer and illustrator. She has published over 50 picture books since 1980. Sales of her books have exceeded five million copies.
Nicola Davies is an English zoologist and writer. She was one of the original presenters of the BBC children's wildlife programme The Really Wild Show. More recently, she has made her name as a children's author. Her books include Home, which was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award, and Poo (2004), which was illustrated by Neal Layton, and was shortlisted for a Blue Peter Book Award in 2006; in the United States, the book is published as Poop: A Natural History of the Unmentionable. Her children's picture book The Promise won the Green Book Award in 2015. She has also written several novels for adults under the pseudonym Stevie Morgan.
Malala's Magic Pencil is a 2017 picture book authored by Malala Yousafzai and illustrated by Kerascoët. The book was published by Little, Brown and Company in the U.S., and Puffin Books in the U.K., with Farrin Jacobs as editor. It shows Yousafzai growing up in Swat, Pakistan, and wishing for a magic pencil to solve her problems; she learns that she is able to make change, such as advancing rights to female education, without one. The book has received very positive reviews, praising both Yousafzai's writing and Kerascoët's illustrations. The book appears on several lists of best children's books of 2017.
