LOS ANGELES – The winners of the 43rd annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced and include a re-examination of the life of longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and a debut novel set in a red-light district in Pakistan.
The awards were handed out during a ceremony Friday at the University of Southern California’s Bovard Auditorium.
The Book Prizes are a prologue to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which is being held Saturday and Sunday on the USC campus.
In addition to the Book Prize winners, several honorary awards were also presented.
James Ellroy, author of several Los Angeles-based crime novels including “L.A. Confidential” and “The Black Dahlia” received the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.
The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose went to Javier Zamora, whose memoir, “Solito,” recounts his 4,000-mile journey from El Salvador to the United States in 1999, when he was just 9-years-old and traveling alone.
The Innovator’s Award went to the Freedom to Read Foundation for its efforts to protect the public’s right to access information in libraries and helping to provide legal counsel to librarians fighting to preserve their First Amendment rights. The foundation has also been active in documenting and opposing the current wave of book bans in several parts of the nation.
The free two-day book event is billed as the nation’s largest literary and cultural festival and features more than 500 writers, musicians, artists and chefs, hundreds of exhibitors and an estimated 150,000 attendees each year.
Here is a complete list of the winners:
Biography
— Beverly Gage, “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century”
Fiction
— Mircea Cartarescu, “Solenoid” (translation by Sean Cotter)
Graphic Novel/Comics
— Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith, “Wash Day Diaries”
History
— Margaret A. Burnham, “By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners”
Mystery/Thriller
— Alex Segura, “Secret Identity”
Poetry
— Dionne Brand,”Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems”
Science & Technology
— Sabina Imbler,”How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures”
The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
— Aamina Ahmad,”The Return of Faraz Ali”
The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction
— Nicola Griffith,”Spear”
Young-adult literature
— Lyn Miller-Lachmann, “Torch”
Current interest
— Dahlia Lithwick, “Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America”
