Alex Award | |
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Awarded for | Adults books with "special appeal" for adolescents |
Country | United States |
Presented by | Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association |
First awarded | 1998 |
Official website | ala |
The Alex Awards are also a separate award given for excellence in entertainment packaging.
The Alex Awards annually recognize "ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults ages 12 through 18". Essentially, the award is a listing by the American Library Association parallel to its annual Best Books for Young Adults, a longer list of recommended books that have been promoted in the YA category. YALSA also names several other "Top Tens" annually.
The awards, named after the dedicated Baltimore librarian Margaret Alexander Edwards, who was known as "Alex," are sponsored by the Margaret Alexander Edwards Trust and Booklist magazine. The list of books published during the previous year serves to provide the choice of titles selected for the awards, which were initially bestowed in 1998 and, since 2002, have been administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). Only one author, Neil Gaiman, has made the list twice.