Michael L. Printz Award 2010s: A decade of winners

The 2010s were a transformative decade for young adult literature, and the Michael L. Printz Award—which honors the most distinguished writing in YA fiction—captured that evolution beautifully. This was the era when YA literature shed its remaining stigma and claimed its rightful place in serious literary conversation. The decade opened with Libba Bray’s wildly inventive Going Bovine, a genre-bending road trip that announced the award’s willingness to celebrate formal experimentation, and closed with Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, a novel-in-verse about a Dominican-American girl navigating faith and identity. Between these bookends, the Printz Award showcased remarkable range: Paolo Bacigalupi’s dystopian Ship Breaker, Nick Lake’s harrowing In Darkness, and the genre-defying brilliance of Marcus Sedgwick’s Midwinterblood.

What made the 2010s distinctive was how the Michael L. Printz Award increasingly reflected the real world’s growing diversity and complexity. Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun brought queer narratives and emotional depth; Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap upended the magical realism landscape; Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay tackled grief and family estrangement with quiet intensity. The award even welcomed graphic narrative into its circle with John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s March: Book Three, honoring the medium as a legitimate and powerful form of literary expression. Across the decade, winning authors proved that YA wasn’t a stepping stone or a lesser category—it was where some of the most vital storytelling was happening.

Below, you’ll find the complete list of Michael L. Printz Award winners from 2010 to 2019, each representing a moment when the field pushed further into new territory.