List of books written by children or teenagers
This is a list of published books that were written, or substantially completed, before the author's twentieth birthday. The list is arranged alphabetically by author.
- Daisy Ashford (1881–1972) wrote The Young Visiters while aged 9. This novella was first published in 1919, preserving her juvenile punctuation and spelling. An earlier work, The Life of Father McSwiney, was dictated to her father when she was 4. It was published almost a century later in 1983.
- Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (born 1984) had her first novel, In the Forests of the Night, published in 1999. Subsequent novels include Demon in My View (2000), Shattered Mirror (2001) Midnight Predator (2002), Hawksong (2003) and Snakecharm (2004).[1]
- Rituparna Bhattacharjee published Bhutia, an award-winning collection of short stories, in India in 1998, when she was 11.[2]
- Pamela Brown (1924–1989) finished her children's novel about an amateur theatre company, The Swish of the Curtain (1941) when she was 16, and later wrote other books about the stage.[3]
- Flavia Bujor (born 1988) wrote The Prophecy of the Stones (2002) when she was 13.
- Félix Francisco Casanova (1956–1976), Le Don de Vorace, published in 1974.
- Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), Poetical Blossoms, published in 1633.
- Maureen Daly (1921–2006), Seventeenth Summer, completed before she was 20, published 1942.
- Ford Madox Ford (né Hueffer) (1873–1939) included in his teenage works The Brown Owl, The Shifting of the Fire (with Joseph Conrad) and The Feather, all first published in 1892.
- Anne Frank (1929–1945), wrote her diary for two and a half years starting on her 13th birthday. It was published posthumously as Het Achterhuis in 1947 and then in English translation in 1952 as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.
- Isamu Fukui (born 1990) wrote Truancy (2008), a dystopian novel about education, when he was 15, and subsequently wrote the prequel Truancy: Origins (2009).
- Alec Greven's How to Talk to Girls was published in 2008 when he was 9 years old (and therefore not yet a teenager). Subsequently he has published How to Talk to Moms, How to Talk to Dads and How to Talk to Santa.
- Alex and Brett Harris completed at 19 the book Do Hard Things.
- Susan Hill (born 1942), The Enclosure, published in 1961.
- S. E. Hinton (born 1950), The Outsiders, first published in 1967.
- George Vernon Hudson (1867–1946), An Elementary Manual of New Zealand Entomology. Completed at the end of 1886, when the author was 19,[4] but not published until 1892.
- Katharine Hull (1921–1977) and Pamela Whitlock (1920–1982), The Far-Distant Oxus, a British children’s novel of 1937, followed in 1938 by Escape to Persia and in 1939 by Oxus in Summer.
- Gordon Korman (born 1963), This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall (1978), three sequels, and I Want to Go Home (1981)
- Joyce Maynard (born 1953), Looking Back. Completed while the author was 19; first published 1973.
- Helen Oyeyemi (born 1984) completed The Icarus Girl while still 18. First published in 2005.
- Christopher Paolini (born 1983), Eragon, the first novel of the Inheritance Cycle, first published 2002.
- Anya Reiss (born 1991) wrote her play Spur of the Moment when she was 17. It was both performed and published in 2010, when she was 18.
- Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) wrote almost all his prose and poetry while still a teenager, for example Le soleil était encore chaud (1866), Le bateau ivre (1871) and Une Saison en Enfer (1873).
- Françoise Sagan (1935–2004), Bonjour tristesse. First published in 1954, when the author was 18.
- Mary Shelley (1797–1851), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Completed during May 1817, when the author was 19; first published the following year.
- Jalaluddin Al-Suyuti (c. 1445–1505) wrote his first book, Sharh Al-Isti'aadha wal-Basmalah, at the age of 17.
- Catherine Webb (born 1986) had four young adult books published before she was 20: Mirror Dreams (2002), Mirror Wakes (2003), Waywalkers (2004) and Timekeepers (2004). Possibly five - The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle was published in February 2006.
See also
References