Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction Books

The Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction was established in 1982 by Scott O'Dell, who wrote Island of the Blue Dolphins and won the Newbery Medal for it in 1961. He spent a career putting young protagonists inside real history and surviving it, and he created the award hoping to increase the interest of young readers in the historical background that shaped their country and their world. It carries a $5,000 prize for the author of a meritorious work of historical fiction for children or young adults, and has been administered since 2022 by the Reinberger Children's Library Center at Kent State University, in partnership with the O'Dell family.

What sets it apart is how tightly it is drawn. A book must be set in the New World — the United States, Canada, Central America, or South America — written in English by a U.S. citizen and published by an American house. One title wins each year. The result is a narrow, deep shelf of hemisphere history told as story rather than survey: a good place to look when a child has finished a unit on the Revolution, the Dust Bowl, or the Middle Passage and wants the same period as a novel.

Information from the Scott O'Dell Award.