Newbery Medal 1970s: A decade of winners

The 1970s Newbery Medal selections tell the story of a prestigious award coming into its own, increasingly willing to tackle serious themes while still honoring the magic that defines great children’s literature. This was the decade when the Newbery Medal began rewarding books that didn’t shy away from difficult truths—animal suffering in Sounder, environmental peril in Julie of the Wolves, the horrors of slavery in The Slave Dancer—yet paired these challenges with the kind of imaginative storytelling that has always made the award distinctive. The winners reflect a literary moment when children’s authors and the gatekeepers of literary merit agreed that young readers deserved complexity, nuance, and the full range of human experience.

What’s striking about these Newbery Medal winners from 1970 to 1979 is how many became fixtures of classroom curricula and family bookshelves alike. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor arrived as fresh voices questioning the world around them, creating stories that felt both immediate to their moment and timeless in their emotional truth. Even the more fantastical entries—Susan Cooper’s The Grey King, Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH—refused to retreat into pure escapism. Virginia Hamilton’s M. C. Higgins, the Great brought lyrical prose and African American life to the center of children’s literature in ways that felt revolutionary for a mainstream award. The decade proved that the Newbery Medal could be an instrument of literary progress, not merely preservation.

Scroll down to explore the full list of winners from this transformative decade.