American Library Assocation’s 2025 Youth Media Awards Winners

You can see a list of all the awards and winners here. I am just focusing on books that might be of interest to children here in Australia or books that hopefully we will find in our libraries or bookstores in the coming months. Sadly some of these book will be very expensive here in Australia. I do recommend you check out all of the other winners - many are Young Adult titles perfect for High School libraries. 

In our Australian context it would be good to explore the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Lola, written by Karla Arenas Valenti, is the 2025 Pura Belpré Children’s Author Award winner. I previously talked about Loteria by Karla Arenas Valenti illustrated by Dana Sanmar. 

I am always keen to see the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for an outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English, in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States. One of the honor titles is Mr. Lepron’s Mystery Soup, written by Giovanna Zoboli, illustrated by Mariachiara Di Giorgio. I have this on order from a bookseller so I will be talking about it here on this blog soon. I was able to preview Mr Lepron's Mystery Soup at the IBBY Congress in Trieste last year. The Mildren L Batchelder winner John the Skeleton is already available here from Gleebooks. Here is the Kirkus Star review. 

John Newbery Medal

Kirkus review

Erin Entrada Kelly has won numerous awards, including the 2018 Newbery Medal for 

Hello, Universe a 2021 Newbery Honor for We Dream of Space.

Newbery Honor Books

• Across So Many Seas by Ruth Behar 
• Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All written and illustrated by Chanel Miller 
• One Big Open Sky by Lesa Cline-Ransome 
• The Wrong Way Home by Kate O’Shaughnessy (I am excited to read this one)

Randolph Caldecott Medal

Kirkus Star review

Caldecott Honor Books

Kirkus review

• Home in a Lunchbox illustrated and written by Cherry Mo 
• My Daddy Is a Cowboy illustrated by C.G. Esperanza, written by Stephanie Seals 
• Noodles on a Bicycle illustrated by Gracey Zhang, written by Kyo Maclear
• Up, Up, Ever Up! Junko Tabei: A Life in the Mountains illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, written by Anita Yasuda 

The Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award

Read my blog post.

Thanks to my friend at Kinderbookswitheverything 

for adding this splendid book to her library.

Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished beginning reader book

Kirkus Review

Publisher page - Simon and Schuster

Vacation by Ame Dyckman, illustrated by Mark Teague

Geisel Honor Books

Kirkus Review

Here is my post about other books in this series

• Fox versus Fox, written and illustrated by Corey R. Tabor 
• Towed by Toad, written and illustrated by Jashar Awan 

Kirkus Review

I was also very pleased to see Louder than Hunger by John Schu received an honor in the Schneider Family Book Awards for books that embody an artistic expression of the disability experience. I read this book on my Kindle last year - please note it is a Young Adult title.

Kirkus Review

Here is a blog post about the winners from Literacious which links with Amazon if you would like to explore the award-winning books further.