Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Winners Announced
The 37th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were awarded tonight at the University of Southern California’s Bovard Auditorium. Hosted by comedian Tig Notaro, the ceremony recognized outstanding literary achievement in 11 categories, including the new Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose.
The Book Prizes ceremony is a prologue to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the nation’s largest literary and cultural festival. This year’s 22nd annual festival will convene more than 600 authors, celebrities, musicians, artists and chefs on the USC campus.
Novelist Thomas McGuane was honored with the 2016 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, and Ruebén Martinez received the Innovator’s Award for his work honoring Latino writers and expanding the community of readers throughout Southern California. A complete list of this year’s Book Prizes winners follows.
- Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Nathan Hill, The Nix, Alfred A. Knopf
- Biography: Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, Alfred A. Knopf
- Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose: Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, Little, Brown and Company
- Current Interest: Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Random House
- Fiction: Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone, Little, Brown and Company
- Graphic Novel/Comics: Nick Drnaso, Beverly, Drawn & Quarterly
- History: Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, Yale University Press
- Mystery/Thriller: Bill Beverly, Dodgers, Crown
- Poetry: Rosmarie Waldrop, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems, New Directions
- Science & Technology: Luke Dittrich, Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets, Random House
- Young Adult Literature: Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree, Harry N. Abrams
The complete list of 2016 Book Prizes finalists and previous winners is available at latimes.com/BookPrizes, as is eligibility and judging information. Festival of Books news and updates are available on the event website, Facebook page and Twitter feed (#bookfest).
