Young Quills reviews 2026
The HA's annual awards for best historical fiction for young people
Quills chat: meet the authors
Family friendly online sessions
28 July–6 August
Meet award-winning and award-nominated authors of children's historical fiction Tony Bradman, Ally Sherrick, Matt Wainwright and Barbara Henderson.
Find out more and book your place
The Young Quills books for each year must be published for the first time in English in the year preceding the competition – so 2025 for this year’s selection. Divided by age suitability the books are given to schools on the condition that the children and young people there write a review of the book following our criteria. Those reviews are used as the basis for us to create the shortlist from which the winners are selected.
You can read some of the children and young people's reviews of all this year's books via the links below. Shortlisted books are marked with an asterisk:
For readers aged 5-8 years
For readers aged 8-11 years
- Becoming Grace*
- Dance of Resistance*
- My Family, the Enemy*
- Shrapnel Boys*
- The Line They Drew Through Us*
- Wrong Tracks*
- A Box Full of Murders
- A Stocking Full of Spies
- Angel's Teeth
- Hero the Highway Girl
- Hidden Treasure
- Hunt for the Golden Scarab
- Letty and the Mystery of the Golden Thread
- Lockett & Wilde: The Ghosts of London
- Netta Becker and the Timeline Crime
- Spirit Warriors
- The Black Pennant
- The Boy at the Window
- The Elixir
- The Girl Who Raced the World
- The Kid Who Fell Through Time
- The Legend of Viking Thunder
- Through Iron Eyes: An Anglo-Saxon Adventure
- Time Tub Travellers Circus Mystery
- Tomorrow's Ghost