Spring book awards highlight novels that are flying below the radar

The Joyce Carol Oates Prize, Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were all awarded in the past week.

Book awards season has begun in earnest with three somewhat lesser known, but still important, prizes: the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.

Jennine Capó Crucet and Willy Vlautin were named winners of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize for Say Hello to My Little Friend and The Horse, respectively. The JCOP, awarded by the New Literary Project, honors “mid-career authors of fiction who advance the vision and mission of NewLit — to drive social change and unleash artistic power across the generations and the nation.” The winners each received $50,000.

Announcing the recipients of its tenth anniversary prize, the NLP said, “These prizes stand not only as testament to Crucet’s and Vlautin’s impressive literary accomplishments as mid-career authors, but also as encouragement and support for work to come. Both authors represent the resilience, power, and diversity of our national communities, and both unforgettably give voice, in their resonantly distinctive styles, to the most urgent issues of today.

“From working-class Nevada to working-class Miami, these authors take on immigration, climate change, music, justice, violence and lost opportunity, and they do so with humor mixed with the tragic, devoid of sentimentality and packed with compassion. Along the way, they tell the stories of a distressed horse and a captive orca, whose lives are impossible to forget. In the largest sense, together these writers amount to, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates for the NewLit Board of Directors, ‘an allegory of America.’”

Capo Crucet and Vlautin will take up brief residence at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching and speaking in a variety of educational and literary settings, beginning in November 2025.

The winning authors were chosen after consideration of a longlist of thirty-two nationally recognized authors, and eventually a shortlist that included three other accomplished artists: Sarah Manguso, Julia Phillps, and Morgan Talty. The jury that selected the short list consisted of Laura Cogan, Mark Danner, Joseph Di Prisco, and Hertha Dawn Sweet Wong. The NewLit Board of Directors judged and selected the Recipients.

Previous winners include Ben Fountain, Manuel Muñoz, Lauren Groff, Danielle Evans, Daniel Mason, Laila Lalami, and Anthony Marra.

The New Literary Project is a partnership between the English Department at UC Berkeley and the Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation and is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year.

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The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction has been awarded to Code Noir, a collection of stories by Canadian poet Canisia Lubrin. She will receive $150,000, while the four finalists will each receive $12,500. The 2025 shortlisted authors were Dominique Fortier (Pale Shadows, translated by Rhonda Mullins), Miranda July (All Fours), Canisia Lubrin (Code Noir), Sarah Manguso (Liars), and Aube Rey Lescure (River East, River West).

The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction aims to address the continued inequality of women in the literary world. Novels, short story collections, and graphic novels written by women and non-binary authors and published in the United States and Canada. In addition to the Prize, The Carol Shields Prize Foundation supports women and non-binary writers through a range of mentorships, scholarships, and residencies across Canada and the U.S.

Code Noir, Lubrin’s debut, is a remarkable work that combines literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions that range from contemporary realism to dystopian literature, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction.

The jury citation noted that “Code Noir contains multitudes. Its characters inhabit multi-layered landscapes of the past, present and future, confronting suffering, communion and metamorphosis. Canisia Lubrin’s prose is polyphonic; the stories invite you to immerse yourself in both the real and the speculative, in the intimate and in sweeping moments of history. Riffing on the Napoleonic decree, Lubrin retunes the legacies of slavery, colonialism and violence. This is a virtuoso collection that breaks new ground in short fiction.”

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The 45th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony was held on April 25, the night before the LA Times Festival of Books.

Jennine Capó Crucet’s Say Hello to My Little Friend won the Fiction award. It’s the story of failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes, whose path leads him to the tank that houses Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium. It’s a darkly humorous fever dream of one Cuban American’s life.

The other finalists were Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot: A Novel; Percival Everett, James: A Novel; Yuri Herrera (translated by Lisa Dillman), Season of the Swamp: A Novel; and Miranda July, All Fours: A Novel.

Jiaming Tang’s Cinema Love, about gay Chinese immigrants, won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It has also won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction.

The other finalists were Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots: Stories; Joseph Earl Thomas, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer: A Novel; Jessica Elisheva Emerson, Olive Days: A Novel; and Julian Zabalbeascoa, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here.

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You can buy these and many others books I’ve featured in my Substack newsletter at my Bookshop.org store. https://bookshop.org/shop/openbook