This paper focuses on the representation of autism in children’s and YA literature and on the translation of these texts. The first part focuses on the appearance of the first autistic characters in the 2000s and on their transformation into protagonists with a discursive agency. They first appeared in detective stories and contributed to a certain archetypal image of autism, which started to become more nuanced and diversified during the last decade: heroines emerged, as well as autistic people with significant cognitive and relational difficulties, and autistic characters were finally given love interests, in novels far from the detective genre. In order to render the poetics of strangeness present in these source works, translators adopt foreignizing translation strategies that challenge the long history of domestication and didacticism practiced when translating for young readers.