The L.A. Times announces its 2019 Book Prize finalists and a new award for science fiction.
It’s an exciting year for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes! This will be its 40th year of celebrating the literary community. The Times announced their 2019 Book Prize finalists today; the winners will be announced at a ceremony in Los Angeles on April 17th.
Additionally, bestselling crime novelist Walter Mosley (best known for his Easy Rawlins mysteries and author of the forthcoming Trouble Is What I Do) will be honored with the 2019 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. Emily Bernard (author of the essay collection Black Is the Body)will be awarded the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. This year’s Innovator’s Award will go to WriteGirl, a vital mentorship program that matches working professionals with teenage girls to encourage empowerment through writing. This is also the inaugural year for the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction, which will honor Ray Bradbury’s legacy by championing groundbreaking writers in his field today. (Woohoo!)
Congratulations to all the finalists:
ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION
Maria Gainza, Optic Nerve
(Catapult)
Lila Savage, Say Say Say
(Knopf)
Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift
(Hogarth Press)
Sarah Elaine Smith, Marilou Is Everywhere
(Riverhead)
De’Shawn Charles Winslow, In West Mills
(Bloomsbury)
FICTION
Tash Aw, We, the Survivors
(FSG)
Madeline Ffitch, Stay and Fight
(FSG)
Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
(FSG)
Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King
(W. W. Norton)
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
(Doubleday)
MYSTERY & THRILLER
Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay
(Ecco Press)
Michael Connelly, The Night Fire
(Little, Brown and Company)
Jane Harper, The Lost Man
(Flatiron)
Laura Lippman, Lady In the Lake
(William Morrow)
Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home
(Mulholland Books)
BIOGRAPHY
Leo Damrosch, The Club
(Yale University Press)
George Packer, Our Man
(Knopf)
Victoria Riskin, Fay Wray and Robert Riskin
(Pantheon)
Yuval Taylor, Zora and Langston
(W. W. Norton)
Evan Thomas, First: Sandra Day O’Connor
(Random House)
CURRENT INTEREST
Mark Arax, The Dreamt Land
(Knopf)
Emily Bazelon, Charged
(Random House)
Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill
(Little, Brown and Company)
Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee
(Catapult)
Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises
(Bloomsbury)
POETRY
Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon
(W. W. Norton)
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
(Graywolf Press)
Sally Wen Mao, Oculus
(Graywolf Press)
Mary Ruefle, Dunce
(Wave Books)
Carmen Gimenez Smith, Be Recorder
(Graywolf Press)
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Katherine Eban, Bottle of Lies
(Ecco Press)
Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl
(Simon & Schuster)
Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women
(Harry N. Abrams)
Maria Popova, Figuring
(Pantheon)
Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science
(Beacon Press)
THE RAY BRADBURY PRIZE FOR SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, AND SPECULATIVE FICTION
Ted Chiang, Exhalation
(Knopf)
Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War
(Gallery/Saga Press)
Brian Evenson, Song for the Unraveling of the World
(Coffee House Press)
Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf
(Riverhead)
Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift
(Hogarth Press)
[via Los Angeles Times]
