Paula Fox, who has died aged 93, was one of the most admired US children’s authors of the 1970s and 80s. The emotional depth of her stories brought her the Newbery medal in 1974 for The Slave Dancer, and the Hans Christian Andersen medal, the highest award for children’s literature, in 1978 for the body of her work.

She published 20 books for children, including the picture books Hungry Fred (1969), illustrated by Rosemary Wells, and Good Ethan (1973), illustrated by Arnold Lobel. Fox also wrote six well-received novels for adults. The most successful of these, Desperate Characters (1970), was turned into a 1971 film starring Shirley MacLaine, but it was not until the 1990s, when the novelist Jonathan Franzen championed Fox’s writing, that they were reissued and Fox was brought to greater prominence.

She concluded her writing career with two memoirs, Borrowed Finery (2001), telling of her traumatic childhood, and The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe (2005), about her life as a news service correspondent in Paris and Warsaw in the late 1940s, and a collection of short stories.

Although Fox had wanted to be a writer from the age of seven, her first book, Maurice’s Room (1966), was not published until she was in her 40s. In this, and in A Likely Place (1967), she told simply written, warm-hearted and insightful stories about lonely children struggling to communicate. Reflecting in a Guardian interview in 2003 on how much her books were drawn from her own experience, Fox said: “What my growing up gave me was that I didn’t just swim like a goldfish, unaware of anything – water, my environment. I had leapt out of the bowl, so I could see in a certain way that is given to some people and not to others. I think I write mostly about children who, like me, are out of the bowl.”

Fox made use of this outsider’s point of view to depict children largely abandoned, either actually or figuratively, by the adults who should be caring for them. She showed how these children have to make journeys on their own; to navigate the world around them and make sense of it. She was dexterous at capturing the strength of their feelings as they confront difficulties, whether in domestic settings, as in Blowfish Live in the Sea (1970), the complicated story of a young man meeting up with his long missing father, or on a larger scale, as in How Many Miles to Babylon? (1967). Here, against the bleak setting of a Brooklyn ghetto, a young boy gets involved with a gang who are stealing dogs. Swept up in an ugly racket, he needs great courage and intelligence to extract himself from their world; Fox credibly invests him with both, but without making him seem in any way exceptional.

The most extreme circumstances Fox used to demonstrate children’s inner resilience are depicted in The Slave Dancer (1973), set in 1840, the story of a 15-year-old kidnapped from the streets of New Orleans. He is put on board a slave ship to play his pipe for slaves forced to “dance” as exercise. Although Fox’s account of the effect on the boy of the dehumanising horrors he witnesses won the Newbery medal, it attracted some criticism for being too violent, and subsequently for not laying enough blame on the white slave-owners and for her use of politically incorrect language. A Place Apart (1981) won a US National Book award and One-Eyed Cat (1984) was a Newbery Honor winner.

Born in New York City, Paula was the daughter of Elsie (nee de Sola), a Cuban scriptwriter, and Paul Hervey Fox, a screenwriter and teacher. She was placed in a home for foundlings in Manhattan a few days after her birth. When she was five months old, she was taken in by the Rev Elwood Corning, who gave her a secure and loving home in Balmsville, New York.

Paula first saw her parents at a deeply traumatic meeting in New York when she was five, an experience she described vividly in Borrowed Finery. Subsequent visits were equally distressing, as neither parent showed an interest in their daughter, and both were entirely unpredictable in their behaviour.

Paula’s childhood was spent shuttling between her parents and strangers. She had a spell in Cuba living on a plantation with her grandmother between 1931 and 1933, before returning to New York, to which she kept coming back after spells with her father, first in Florida and then in New Hampshire after her parents’ divorce. Later, she spent a year in a finishing school in Montreal.

After leaving school, Fox worked in a number of jobs, including as a news service correspondent in Europe, before studying at Columbia University, New York (1955-58), and teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, from 1963.

Her first marriage, at 17, to Howard Bird, was shortlived. After it ended, a brief liaison led to the birth of a daughter, whom she gave up for adoption. In Borrowed Finery, Fox tells how this daughter, Linda, traced her in later years. In 1948 she married the literary critic Richard Sigerson and had two sons, Adam and Gabriel, before they divorced in 1954. Her third marriage, in 1962, was to Martin Greenberg. He survives her, as do Adam and Linda, eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

• Paula Fox, writer, born 22 April 1923; died 1 March 2017