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Finalists and honorees for the 46th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced Wednesday.
Writer-curator Ekow Eshun is among the biography finalists for “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them,” which parses Black masculinity arsenic embodied by assorted civilian rights activists, philosophers and different visionaries. Contenders successful the fabrication categories ranged from seasoned novelists similar Michael Connelly to breakouts including Saou Ichikawa, whose debut novel, “Hunchback,” was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
Many selected books evoke the top anxieties of our time, from government-sanctioned humanities revisionism to the ongoing proliferation of AI.
“The Joy Luck Club” writer Amy Tan volition beryllium honored with this year’s Robert Kirsch Award for beingness achievement. Nonprofit We Need Diverse Books and novelist Adam Ross volition person the Innovator’s Award and Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, respectively.
Winners successful the remaining categories volition beryllium revealed astatine the 46th L.A. Times Book Prizes connected April 17 astatine USC’s Bovard Auditorium. The ceremonial is simply a prelude to the yearly L.A. Times Festival of Books, which this twelvemonth runs April 18-19.
The Oakland-born Tan volition beryllium fixed the marquee Robert Kirsch Award, which celebrates lit with determination and thematic connections to the Western United States, for her highly awarded assemblage of enactment exploring multicultural individuality and its analyzable effects connected familial bonds.
“Throughout her bonzer career, Amy Tan has transformed American lit by shining a airy connected the affectional complexities of family, individuality and taste inheritance,” said Times elder exertion for Books Sophia Kercher. “Her enactment confronts the societal and taste legacies of the American West with affluent details of the migrant experience.”
Tan’s 1989 debut novel, “The Joy Luck Club,” which interweaves the stories of 4 Chinese migrant mothers and their American-born daughters successful San Francisco, is simply a staple of the modern literate canon and was antecedently a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. “The Joy Luck Club,” on with the essays, memoirs and novels Tan has since penned — astir precocious 2024’s “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” — person besides led her to beryllium inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and earned her a National Humanities Medal from President Biden.
We Need Diverse Books, a viral 2014 Twitter run turned nonprofit, is being honored with the Innovator’s Award for its efforts toward promoting diverseness and inclusion successful children’s and young big publishing.
According to the WNDB website, upon the nonprofit’s motorboat much than a decennary ago, lone 8% of children’s books published successful the U.S. were written by authors of color. In 2023, that fig roseate to 47%, successful nary tiny portion owed to WNDB’s grants, room partnerships and different advocacy work, per the Cooperative Children’s Book Center astatine the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We Need Diverse Books has played an important relation successful publishing by championing stories that bespeak our world, and opening doors for writers and readers,” said Times Executive Editor Terry Tang. “We are thrilled to admit them with this year’s Innovator’s Award, honoring their unwavering committedness to entree and practice successful literature.”
Ross rounds retired the L.A. Times Book Prize honorees arsenic the victor of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for “Playworld,” a semi-autobiographical caller astir a teen increasing up successful 1980s New York that is described arsenic “less a bildungsroman than a communicative of miseducation.”
In summation to the accomplishment awards, the Book Prizes admit titles successful 13 categories: audiobooks, autobiographical prose (the Christopher Isherwood Prize), biography, existent interest, fiction, archetypal fabrication (the Art Seidenbaum Award), graphic novel/comics, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, subject fiction, subject and exertion and young big literature. Each category’s finalists and winners are chosen by panels of writers specializing successful that genre.
For much accusation astir the Book Prizes, including the implicit database of finalists, sojourn latimes.com/BookPrizes.
Robert Kirsch Award
Amy Tan
Innovator’s Award
We Need Diverse Books
The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose
Adam Ross, “Playworld: A Novel”
The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Andy Anderegg, “Plum”
Krystelle Bamford, “Idle Grounds: A Novel”
Addie E. Citchens, “Dominion: A Novel”
Justin Haynes, “Ibis: A Novel”
Saou Ichikawa translated by Polly Barton, “Hunchback: A Novel”
Achievement successful Audiobook Production, presented by Audible
Molly Jong-Fast (narrator), Matie Argiropoulos (producer); “How to Lose Your Mother”
Jason Mott, Ronald Peet, and JD Jackson (narrators), Diane McKiernan (producer); “People Like Us: A Novel”
James Aaron Oh (narrator), Linda Korn (producer); “The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel”
Imani Perry (narrator), Suzanne Mitchell (producer); “Black successful Blues”
Maggi-Meg Reed, Jane Oppenheimer, Carly Robins, Jeff Ebner, David Pittu, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Mark Bramhall, Petrea Burchard, Robert Petkoff, Kimberly Farr, Cerris Morgan-Moyer, Peter Ganim, Jade Wheeler, Steve West, and Jim Seybert (narrators), Kelly Gildea (producer); “The Correspondent: A Novel”
Biography
Joe Dunthorne, “Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance”
Ekow Eshun, “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them”
Ruth Franklin, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank”
Beth Macy, “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family successful a Fractured America”
Amanda Vaill, “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters successful an Age of Revolution”
Current Interest
Jeanne Carstensen, “A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis”
Stefan Fatsis, “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary”
Brian Goldstone, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless successful America”
Gardiner Harris, “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson”
Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire successful a Transformed World”
Fiction
Tod Goldberg, “Only Way Out: A Novel”
Stephen Graham Jones, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”
Mia McKenzie, “These Heathens: A Novel”
Andrés Felipe Solano translated by Will Vanderhyden, “Gloria: A Novel”
Bryan Washington, “Palaver: A Novel”
Graphic Novel/Comics
Eagle Valiant Brosi, “Black Cohosh”
Jaime Hernandez, “Life Drawing: A Love and Rockets Collection”
Michael D. Kennedy, “Milk White Steed”
Lee Lai, “Cannon”
Carol Tyler, “The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief”
History
Char Adams, “Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore”
Bench Ansfield, “Born successful Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City”
Jennifer Clapp, “Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters”
Eli Erlick, “Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950”
Aaron G. Fountain Jr., “High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance successful Postwar America”
Mystery/Thriller
Megan Abbott, “El Dorado Drive”
Ace Atkins, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World: A Novel”
Lou Berney, “Crooks: A Novel About Crime and Family”
Michael Connelly, “The Proving Ground: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel”
S.A. Cosby, “King of Ashes: A Novel”
Poetry
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “The New Economy”
Chet’la Sebree, “Blue Opening: Poems”
Richard Siken, “I Do Know Some Things”
Devon Walker-Figueroa, “Lazarus Species: Poems”
Allison Benis White, “A Magnificent Loneliness”
Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction
Stephen Graham Jones, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”
Jordan Kurella, “The Death of Mountains”
Nnedi Okorafor, “Death of the Author: A Novel”
Adam Oyebanji, “Esperance”
Silvia Park, “Luminous: A Novel”
Science & Technology
Mariah Blake, “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death successful the Age of Forever Chemicals”
Peter Brannen, “The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World”
Karen Hao, “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares successful Sam Altman’s OpenAI”
Laura Poppick, “Strata: Stories from Deep Time”
Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire successful a Transformed World”
Young Adult Literature
K. Ancrum, “The Corruption of Hollis Brown”
Idris Goodwin, “King of the Neuro Verse”
Jamie Jo Hoang, “My Mother, the Mermaid Chaser”
Trung Le Nguyen, “Angelica and the Bear Prince”
Hannah V. Sawyerr, “Truth Is: A Novel successful Verse”
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