Newbery Medal 1960s: A decade of winners

The 1960s were a watershed decade for the Newbery Medal, that most prestigious of children’s literature honors established in 1922. The award had always championed quality storytelling for young readers, but something shifted in this era—authors began pushing boundaries in ways that reflected the decade’s own restlessness. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which won in 1963, epitomizes this spirit: a science fiction adventure that dared to grapple with philosophical complexity and didn’t shy away from weighty themes. Similarly, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, the 1961 winner, broke new ground by centering an Indigenous female protagonist in a survival narrative that took her inner life seriously. These weren’t didactic morality tales; they were genuinely imaginative stories that trusted young readers to handle nuance and depth.

What’s striking about scanning the full list of Newbery Medal winners from 1960 to 1969 is how diverse the voices and settings became. You had contemporary urban realism with Emily Cheney Neville’s It’s Like This, Cat; historical fiction ranging from Elizabeth George Speare’s The Bronze Bow (set in Roman-occupied Judea) to Elizabeth Borton de Treviño’s I, Juan de Pareja (following an enslaved Black artist in seventeenth-century Spain); and the imaginative fantasy of Lloyd Alexander’s The High King, which wrapped up the decade with Welsh-inspired epic adventure. The award’s judges seemed increasingly convinced that children’s literature could be intellectually ambitious without losing warmth or accessibility—a philosophy that would shape discussions about the genre for decades to come.

Below is the complete roster of Newbery Medal winners throughout the 1960s: