The Los Angeles Times has revealed the finalists and honorees for its annual book prizes.
Amy Tan will receive the newspaper’s Robert Kirsch Award, which “recognizes a writer with a substantial connection to the American West.” Tan, a native of Oakland, California, is known for novels that are frequently set in the San Francisco Bay Area, including The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter.
Winning the Innovator’s Award, which “recognizes the people and institutions that are doing cutting-edge work to bring books, publishing, and storytelling into the future,” is We Need Diverse Books, the nonprofit group that champions diversity in book publishing. The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose was awarded to Adam Ross for Playworld.
The finalists for the fiction prize are Only Way Out by Tod Goldberg, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, These Heathens by Mia McKenzie, Palaver by Bryan Washington, and Gloria, written by Andrés Felipe Solano and translated by Will Vanderhyden.
In the history category, the finalists are Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore by Char Adams; Before Gender: Lost Stories From Trans History, 1850-1950 by Eli Erlick; Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield; High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America by Aaron G. Fountain Jr., and Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters by Jennifer Clapp.
Competing for the young adult literature prize are K. Ancrum for The Corruption of Hollis Brown, Trung Le Nguyen for Angelica and the Bear Prince, Idris Goodwin for King of the Neuro Verse, Hannah V. Sawyerr for Truth Is, and Jamie Jo Hoang for My Mother, the Mermaid Chaser.
The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were first awarded in 1980. This year’s winners will be revealed at a ceremony in Los Angeles on April 17. The full list of finalists—including prizes for audiobooks, poetry, and graphic novels, among other categories—is available at the Times website.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
