Prizewinning Books for Kids
recommended by judging panels of children's book experts
Last updated: May 14, 2025
A huge number of books are being published for children all the time, but the ones given the most publicity are not always the best. If you don't have much time to browse or read reviews, picking prizewinning kids' books is a good choice, letting librarians and other children's book specialists do the quality checking for you.
At Five Books, we like to keep track of award-winning books for kids as a way of drawing attention to quality reading material that is enjoyable as well as educational or thought-provoking.
Below, you will find some of the winners from recent years of prestigious prizes for books for children, such as American Library Association awards in the US, and the Yoto Carnegies in the UK.
John the Skeleton
Triinu Laan, Marja-Liisa Plats (illustrator), translated by Adam Cullen
🏆 2025 Mildred L. Batchelder Award for outstanding children’s book translated into English
When John retires from his job as classroom skeleton, Grams and Gramps bring him to their home in the Estonian woods. John fits right into his new family, and in some ways his life is just beginning. Whilst an exploration of ageing and death, this is a warm story full of life.
The First State of Being
by Erin Entrada Kelly
🏆 2025 Newbery Medal
Warm-hearted speculative fiction set in 1999, featuring 12-year-old Michael, his teenage babysitter Gibby, a time-travelling boy from the future, and complications to do with teleportation and growing up.
The Tree and the River
by Aaron Becker
🏆 2024 Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration and Shadowers’ Choice Award
A wordless picture book that traces the change over time of a landscape and the human impact on that landscape, viewed through the long life of a riverside oak tree.
Can You Get Rainbows in Space?
Dr Sheila Kanani, Liz Kay (illustrator)
🏆 2024 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize
“This book is beautifully presented and cleverly done. It starts with the general aspects about colour and light, but then goes through different colours and brings out quirky facts about them. There’s a lot there to really engage children.” Read more...
Top Science Books for Children: Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize 2024
Dorothy Bishop, Scientist
Houses with a Story
by Seiji Yoshida & translated by Jan Mitsuko Cash
🏆 2024 Mildred L. Batchelder Award for outstanding children’s book translated into English
Subtitled A Dragon's Den, a Ghostly Mansion, a Library of Lost Books, and 30 More Amazing Places to Explore, this is an intriguing book that invites readers to explore some unique houses and their contents, and to meet the inhabitants. From an abandoned subway to a lighthouse, from a dragon tamer’s post office to the hideout of a timid ogre, each place can be a source of inspiration for readers to spin their own stories. By an illustrator with a background in anime and video game art, this book will appeal across quite a wide age range.
Big
by Vashti Harrison
🏆 2024 Caldecott Medal
The girl in this picture book grows up with a positive outlook on life until comments about her size gradually chip away her self-image. The sparse text succinctly demonstrates the impact of thoughtless comments, how being told she is too big makes her feel small, how she feels judged yet invisible. The illustrations play with perspective, expressing the girl’s changing perception of herself as she responds to fat-shaming, and later when she manages to love herself again.
The Eyes & The Impossible
by Dave Eggers & Shawn Harris (illustrator)
🏆 2024 Newbery Medal
A story of friendship, beauty and freedom exuberantly narrated by a dog called Johannes. The pictures are composed of existing fine art landscapes into which the illustrator has seamlessly inserted the dog protagonist. The edition with the decorative wooden cover is very attractive.
The Fire, The Water, and Maudie McGinn
by Sally J. Pla
🏆 2024 Schneider Family Book Award for Middle Grade
Maudie, who is autistic, lives for summer holidays with her father in the mountain cabin he has built, but this year they are forced by wildfire to evacuate to a beach town. There, Maudie is drawn to surfing but scared to try. Burdened by secrets and her mother’s expectations, can she overcome her fears and transform her sense of self-worth?
Am I Made of Stardust?
Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Chelen Écija (illustrator)
🏆 2023 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize
“This is a lovely book. One of the Royal Society people who is in this field and does outreach was saying these are exactly the kind of questions children ask him all the time. It has really good detail, with good experiments in it. Again, it’s intended for children in the 8-11 age range…the judging panel felt that it was a well-judged book with very rich content.” Read more...
The Best Science Books for Children: the 2023 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize
Usha Goswami, Psychologist
Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal about the Japanese American Incarceration
by Elizabeth Partridge & Lauren Tamaki (illustrator)
🏆 2023 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal
🏆 BolognaRagazzi Award: Photography – 2023 Special Category
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, over 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were incarcerated in camps. Three photographers set out to document life at the Manzanar concentration camp in the California desert. This book vividly brings history to life by weaving the photos together with atmospheric illustrations and simple text. Given the different styles of the photographs, this book is also a brilliant resource for teaching children to think about and evaluate primary sources.
Ages 10-14
Listen: How Evelyn Glennie, a Deaf Girl, Changed Percussion
Shannon Stocker, Devon Holzwarth (illustrator)
🏆 2023 Schneider Family Book Award for young children
This is a picture book story of the inspiring life of Evelyn Glennie, who started to go deaf from the age of 10. Instead of giving up on her love of music, she switched instruments from piano and clarinet to percussion, going on to become the world’s first full-time solo percussionist and winning Grammy Awards for her recordings. Having pushed the boundaries of percussion and access to music education, Dame Evelyn has also established a charitable foundation to Teach the World to Listen. Holzwarth’s pictures are clearly intended to illustrate that we can feel sound, that touch is another way of interpreting vibrating air.
Ages 3-6
Just a Girl: A True Story of World War II
Lia Levi, Jess Mason (illustrator), translated by Sylvia Notini
🏆 2023 Mildred L. Batchelder Award for outstanding children’s book translated into English
Six year old Lia has spent the summer of 1938 with her family at the seaside. To her, being Jewish means going to synagogue some Saturdays, lighting candles, getting presents for Hanukkah, and not eating bread at Passover. Why does it suddenly mean she is not allowed to go back to school? The young Lia is a perceptive and resilient narrator of her experiences as she is uprooted by fascism and war from her family life in Turin and sent to hide in a convent. This is an adaptation for children of Levi’s award-winning memoir published in 1994.
Ages 7-11
Hot Dog
by Doug Salati
🏆 2023 Caldecott Medal
A dog is overwhelmed by the heat and noise of summer in the city. The loving owner understands, and they go to spend a fabulous day on an island beach. When they come back to the city in the evening things have cooled and calmed down. This picture book has sparse text; young readers will notice plenty to talk about in the colourful, detailed illustrations.
Ages 3-6
Freewater
by Amina Luqman-Dawson
🏆 2023 Newbery Medal
Loosely based on maroon communities of escaped slaves and their descendants, this is an exciting novel of courage and resistance. With plantation overseers and their dogs hot on the trail, 12 year old Homer and his younger sister Ada flee into the swamp of the American South where they join a secret community named Freewater. Adventure inspired by history.
Ages 9-12
The Midnight Fair
by Gideon Sterer & Mariachiara Di Giorgio (illustrator)
2022 Yoto Kate Greenaway Medal Shadowers’ Choice Award
A funfair is being set up at the edge of a forest. Intrigued, wild animals quietly watch from inside the dark woods. When the lights are turned off for the night and people leave, the animals switch them back on and start their own party. The illustrator plays wonderfully with shadow and brightness, and the colour flow recreates the movement of the lights in the night. The perspective of looking on from outside evokes a world that continues beyond the confines of the page. This is a wordless picture book, perfect for children who like to tell the story in their own words.
Ages 3-7
If the World Were 100 People
Jackie McCann, Aaron Cushley (illustrator)
🏆 2022 Royal Society Young People’s Books Prize
“It’s about percentages, it’s about showing the spread of characteristics across the world. It’s picking up interesting points, and it raises a lot of points that can be built on and explored. You don’t have to read the book, you can open it at a single page and form a lesson from it or form a discussion from it, be it at the dinner table at home or in the school room.” Read more...
Best Science Books for Children: the 2022 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize
Alan Wilson, Scientist
October, October
Katya Balen, Angela Harding (illustrator)
🏆 2022 Yoto Carnegie Medal
The reader quickly feels close to October, the quirky 11 year old narrator who lives off-grid with her father. October loves to find objects in the woods and imagine their stories, until one day her world is turned upside down and she is forced to move to London. There, she discovers mudlarking: searching for objects in the Thames riverbed when the tide is out. October, October is a lyrical novel alive with the beauty of the natural world, and of relationships given the chance to heal.
Ages 8-12
The People's Painter: How Ben Shahn Fought for Justice with Art
by Cynthia Levinson & Evan Turk (illustrator)
🏆 2022 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal
A picture book about the life and work of Benjamin Shahn (1898-1969), from his childhood in Lithuania as a Jew under Tsar Nicholas II to his life as a young immigrant and later an established artist in the United States. This book is very much about the process of being an artist, about knowing who you are in order to find out what kind of artist you are. Shahn used his art for social dialogue, insisting that the purpose was to communicate. Evan Turk effectively uses connected scenes, distorted shapes and symbolic forms to tell the visual part of the story.
Ages 4-7
My City Speaks
Darren Lebeuf & Ashley Barron (illustrator)
🏆 2022 Schneider Family Book Award for young children
A visually impaired narrator describes the sounds, smells and tastes of the city on the way to a music recital in the park. The rhythmic, alliterative language and colourful textured collage illustrations will appeal to young children. An engaging picture book about the ways we experience the world, encouraging children to think about all the different senses.
Ages 2-6
When the Sky Falls
by Phil Earle
British Book Awards 2022 – Children’s Fiction Winner
Aged 12, Joseph still hasn’t learnt to read. Dyslexia is not widely understood, and being laughed at in school has made him angry. Loss has made him more furious still. While other children are being evacuated from London in 1941 he gets sent to London to be looked after by his grandmother’s gruff old friend, Mrs F, who runs a zoo. In Joseph’s experience, friendship and trust count for nothing, but gradually a special bond forms between the boy and Adonis, the zoo’s remaining gorilla. But what happens if Adonis’ cage is damaged by the bombs? A silverback on the loose during the blitz? Sometimes doing the right thing feels completely wrong.
Ages 8-12
The Last Cuentista
by Donna Barba Higuera
🏆 2022 Newbery Medal
Science fiction blended with Mexican folklore. If you leave Earth in the knowledge that you can never return, what will you want to take with you? 12 year old Petra Peña chooses her grandmother’s stories. But on board her spaceship a fanatical Collective is bent on creating a utopia by erasing everyone’s memories and purging those they are unable to reprogramme. If we make a new society by forgetting what we have left behind, will we know what it is to be human? A novel about the importance of remembering stories and passing them on, and of creating our own stories. Ages 10-14
Small in the City
by Sydney Smith
🏆 2021 Kate Greenaway medal
This book is set in Toronto, but will resonate with kids in any snowy city. A child guides the reader along busy streets, past building sites and yards, down an alley, up a tree and past a bench… Gradually it is revealed that the narrator isn’t speaking to the reader so much as to a missing cat. The illustrations are tightly woven with the text, in a simple story expressing loneliness and worry, but also comfort and confidence.
Ages 4-6
I am a book. I am a portal to the universe.
by Stefanie Posavec & Miriam Quick (illustrator)
🏆 2021 Royal Society Young People’s Books Prize
“My very favourite of the books. In fact, I liked it so much that I bought fifteen copies and I’ve been giving them out to everyone…. I wasn’t the only one who loved this book. I think everyone was intrigued by it, because it’s so interactive. It’s a true and very creative art and science fusion.” Read more...
Best Science Books for Children: the 2021 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize
Katharine Cashman, Scientist
Look Both Ways
by Jason Reynolds
🏆 2021 Carnegie Medal
A mixed collection of short stories, some of them very lovely, by The US National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. The stories are bound by a common thread: they all take place on the way home from school, in that space where children are unsupervised by teachers or parents. A myriad thoughts and words form along the city blocks that separate school and home, as relationships are built and events unfold on the children's separate but interconnected journeys.
Ages 8-10
Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera
by Candace Fleming & Eric Rohmann (illustrator)
🏆 2021 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal
Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera is a scientific picture book about the short, busy life of the honeybee. It contains the usual facts that an information book should but also provides food for thought about how we all follow a similar cycle of life and death, and how much work really goes into a spoonful of honey. What lifts this book is the seamless interweaving of the text with the detailed, magnified oil painting illustrations.
Ages 4-8
When You Trap a Tiger
by Tae Keller
🏆 2021 Newbery Medal
“Long, long ago, when tiger walked like man…” Thus start the folktales which Halmoni (grandmother in Korean) has been telling Lily and her older sister since they were little girls. Now that Halmoni is ageing and Lily is coming of age, a magical tiger appears straight out of Lily’s favourite tale to strike a bargain: healing for Halmoni if she releases the history she has kept bottled up. A sparkling novel about the power of stories.
Ages 8-12
King and the Dragonflies
by Kacen Callender, narrated by Ron Butler
2020 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (USA)
Ages: 9 – 12
Narrator:Â Ron Butler
Audiobook length: 5 hours and 3 minutes
“In this story we’re in Louisiana with a young Black boy, who is grieving his older brother who had just died, suddenly. It’s a tough topic, certainly, but we’re in a year where so many people are experiencing such trauma. Ron Butler’s narration just brings these different characters off of the page and into your ears.” Read more...
The Best Audiobooks for Kids of 2020
Emily Connelly, Journalist
“This one is fascinating. It really captures, for example, why the Earth has a magnetic field. It explains force and energy balances, the idea of electromagnetism. It’s really, really good, well explained science. And you’ve got the added fun of cats in it! We wanted to try and have some books that might reach out to children who are maybe a bit intimidated by science or don’t think they’re very good at it, or perhaps just aren’t very interested in it. And we thought this book could do that: it would appeal to a much wider audience.” Read more...
The Best Science Books for Kids: the 2020 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize
Mike Kendall, Scientist
Lark
by Anthony McGowan
🏆 2020 Carnegie Medal
Lark by Antony McGowan was the winner of the 2020 Carnegie Medal, the UK's most prestigious children's book prize. It's the fourth book about two brothers, Nicky and Kenny, but was described by the chair of the judges, Julia Hale, as a "standalone masterpiece". The book was published by Barrington Stoke, a publisher that focuses on kids with dyslexia or who find reading a bit tougher.
“It’s about the contributions that African Americans have made to America and celebrating and exploring those. The poetry is striking and it’s such a perfect partnership between Kadir Nelson’s illustrations and Kwame Alexander’s words. It’s just this beautiful love letter to America.” Read more...
The Best Children’s Books: The 2020 Newbery Medal and Honor Winners
Krishna Grady, Librarian
New Kid
by Jerry Craft
🏆 2020 Newbery Medal
New Kid by Jerry Craft is wonderful graphic novel about a Black kid who goes to a private school and feels out of place. It won the 2020 Newbery Medal, America's most prestigious prize for a children's book, but is relatable for kids anywhere.
“It’s about a kid, Jordan Banks, who transfers to the Riverdale Academy Day School. He’s in seventh grade and he can’t help seeing privilege everywhere. He’s one of the few African American students in the school. The beauty of the story is that he’s regularly dealing with racism and microaggressions and bullying, but there’s also friendship and learning who you are, which is especially hard in middle school. Craft just created this really intimate and relatable world that invites kids in and holds them there.” Read more...
The Best Children’s Books: The 2020 Newbery Medal and Honor Winners
Krishna Grady, Librarian
Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story
Kevin Noble Maillard & Juana Martinez-Neal (illustrator)
🏆 2020 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal
“First of all, the cover totally drew me in. Juana Martinez-Neal’s illustrations are always so warm and inviting and made me want to read it straight away. What I love about this book is that while it’s specifically a Native American family story, it really could be any family that is connecting and bonding over a tradition and over food. The text is brief and delightfully bubbles along, it’s poetic. Between the pictures and the words, you can imagine all the scrumptious food smells and the joy of the togetherness.” Read more...
Bianca Schulze, Children's Author
Planetarium: Welcome to the Museum
Raman Prinja (illustrated by Chris Wormell)
🏆 2019 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize
“If you’re interested at all in what’s out there in space, this book is particularly gorgeous.” Read more...
The Best Science Books for Kids: the 2019 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize
Sheila Rowan, Physicist
“This is a book of poems about nature for children. Each poem describes an individual animal, creature or plant and contains words that are going out of usage. It’s very playful and compelling. The illustrations are utterly breathtaking. Jackie Morris… she’s got to be one of the most brilliant artists working in children’s books at the moment.” Read more...
The Best Picture Books of 2017
Zoe Greaves, Children's Author
