Finalists for Los Angeles Times Book Prizes announced
The awards will be presented the night before the annual Festival of Books on April 16.
The finalists for the 41st Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced this morning. The awards are presented the night before the 26th annual LAT Festival of Books, which is usually held on the campus of the University of Southern California, but the ceremony will be live-streamed via Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Finalists include Isabel Wilkerson, Danielle Evans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Natalie Diaz, Ivy Pochoda, and N.K. Jemisin.
The winners in three special categories were also announced. Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko will receive the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. And the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose has been awarded to Andrew O’Hagan for his coming-of-age novel, “Mayflies.” The Innovator’s Award will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.
The Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement honors a writer whose work has made a significant contribution to literature about the American West. Leslie Marmon Silko grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in New Mexico and writes about the Native American experience, as well as native traditions and community. Her best-known books include “Laguna Woman,” “Ceremony,” and “Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit.”
Fiction:
Peter Cameron, “What Happens at Night”
David Diop (translator Anna Moschovakis), “At Night All Blood is Black”
Akwaeke Emezi, “The Death of Vivek Oji”
Danielle Evans, “The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories”
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, “Likes”
The Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction:
Douglas Stuart, “Shuggie Bain”
Maisy Card, “These Ghosts Are Family: A Novel”
Meng Jin, “Little Gods”
Deesha Philyaw, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies”
Shruti Swamy, “A House is a Body: Stories”
Mystery/thriller:
Christopher Bollen, “A Beautiful Crime”
S.A. Cosby, “Blacktop Wasteland”
Jennifer Hillier, “Little Secrets: A Novel”
Rachel Howzell Hall, “And Now She’s Gone”
Ivy Pochoda, “These Women: A Novel”
Poetry:
Victoria Chang, “Obit”
Anthony Cody, “Borderland Apocrypha”
Natalie Diaz, “Postcolonial Love Poem”
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, “The Age of Phillis”
Nikky Finney, “Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts”
The Ray Bradbury Prize for science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction:
Susanna Clarke, “Piranesi”
Megan Giddings, “Lakewood: A Novel”
Stephen Graham Jones, “The Only Good Indians”
N.K. Jemisin, “The City We Became: A Novel”
Aoko Matsuda (Translator Polly Barton), “Where the Wild Ladies Are”
Young adult literature:
Dean Atta, “The Black Flamingo”
Tracy Deonn, “Legendborn”
Yusef Salaam and Ibi Zoboi, “Punching the Air”
Karen Schneemann and Lily Williams, “Go With the Flow”
Allan Wolf, “The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep: Voices From the Donner Party”
Biography:
Les Payne and Tamara Payne, “The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X”
Heather Clark, “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath”
Blake Gopnik, “Warhol”
David Michaelis, “Eleanor”
William Souder, “Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck”
Current interest:
Brittany K. Barnett, “A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom”
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, “The Undocumented Americans”
Christine Montross, “Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration”
Jacob Soboroff, “Separated: Inside An American Tragedy”
Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”