The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes winners were announced April 21. Spear, Nicola Griffith’s “queer Arthurian masterpiece for the modern era,” earned The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction.
The other finalists in the category were:
The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran
The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings
The Mountain in the Sea: A Novel by Ray Nayler
Liberation Day: Stories by George Saunders
See the full list of LA Times Book Prize winners below.
BIOGRAPHY
Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
FICTION
Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid (translation by Sean Cotter)
GRAPHIC NOVELS/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
Sabrina 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
The shortlists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been revealed. The Book Prizes recognize 56 works in 12 categories. The complete list of finalists is here.
Sff works are honored in the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction category, sponsored by the Ray Bradbury Foundation. The category judges are Craig Laurance Gidney, Tim Pratt, and Lucy A. Snyder.
RAY BRADBURY PRIZE FINALISTS
The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran (Dreamland Books)
Spear by Nicola Griffith (Tordotcom)
The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings (Hachette Book Group/Redhook)
The Mountain in the Sea: A Novel by Ray Nayler (MCD)
Liberation Day: Stories by George Saunders (Random House)
The winners will be announced at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on April 22-23 at the USC campus.
The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction was awarded to Zen Cho’s story collection Spirits Abroad.
Judges commended the stories for their imagination, tenderness, joy and play. “During the past two years, for many of us, the world has felt harder than ever to exist in,” they said in a citation. “‘Spirits Abroad’ gave this judging panel a much-needed adventure.”
The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction
Mariana Enriquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, translated by Megan McDowell
Marissa Levien, The World Gives Way
Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland
Ryka Aoki, Light From Uncommon Stars
Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad
Works and authors of genre interest in other categories include Mystery/Thriller finalists S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Velvet Was the Night, and Young Adult Literature finalist Darcie Little Badger’s A Snake Falls to Earth.
The complete list of finalists is here. The winners will be announced on April 22, the day before the LA Times Festival of Books begins.
The Los Angeles Times today named the winners of the 41st annual Book Prizes today as a prologue to the Festival of Books, Stories and Ideas. Traditionally the nation’s largest in-person literary event, the festival will be held online this year, beginning on Saturday, April 17, and continuing over the course of six days.
The winners of genre interest follow. The complete list of winners is here.
The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction
The Only Good Indiansby Stephen Graham Jones
Graphic Novel/Comics
Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som
Angie Wang was the judge for the Graphic Novel / Comics category, and Tananarive Due was the judge for The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction.
The Los Angeles Times today unveiled the finalists for the 41st annual Book Prizes. Winners will be announced virtually on Friday, April 16 in a prologue to the Festival of Books, Stories and Ideas. Traditionally the nation’s largest in-person literary event, the festival will be held online this year, beginning on Saturday, April 17, and continuing over the course of six days.
The finalists of genre interest follow below. The complete list of finalists is here.
The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction
Piranesiby Susanna Clarke
Lakewood: A Novelby Megan Giddings
The City We Became: A Novel (The Great Cities Trilogy, 1)by N. K. Jemisin
The Only Good Indiansby Stephen Graham Jones
Where the Wild Ladies Areby Aoko Matsuda, Polly Barton (translator)
Graphic Novel/Comics
Umma’s Table by Yeon-sik Hong, Janet Hong (translator)
Marlon James won the new Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and Walter Mosley was honored with the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement when the 40th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were awarded today on The Times’ Books Twitter feed.
Following each prize announcement, a video of the winner’s speech was shared on Twitter, with all videos now compiled on The Times’ YouTube page.
The Book Prizes recognized outstanding literary works in 12 categories.
2019 Book Prizes Winners
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift: A Novel, Hogarth
Biography
George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, Knopf
Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose
Emily Bernard, Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, Knopf
Current Interest
Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, Random House
Fiction
Ben Lerner, The Topeka School: A Novel, Farrar, Straus, Giroux
Graphic Novel/Comics
Eleanor Davis, The Hard Tomorrow, Drawn & Quarterly
History
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Yale University Press
Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction
Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy Book 1), Riverhead
Science & Technology
Maria Popova, Figuring, Knopf
Young Adult Literature
Malla Nunn, When the Ground is Hard, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers
Marlon James
Bradbury Prize winner Marlon James said in his acceptance remarks:
Well, you know, there is something kind of ironic about winning an award in tribute to the creator of the original American dystopia when we are in a kind of dystopia. You know, I I think kind of it makes me think even more about Ray Bradbury and more about how we look at his dystopia as a possible future not realizing in a way it has happened. You know, we’re not burning books but we’re burning intelligence, we are burning expertise, we are burning the simple privilege of knowing, and we’re seeing the consequences of that. But let’s not deal too much with the bad because this is a great occasion and I’m so incredibly honored and so incredibly humbled by winning this the inaugural Ray Bradbury prize for science fiction fantasy and speculative fiction…
Walter Mosley’s acceptance video:
The complete list of 2019 Book Prizes finalists and previous winners is available at latimes.com/BookPrizes, as is eligibility and judging information
The Book Prizes awards ceremony usually takes place at the LA Times Festival of Books in the spring, but the event was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak, and rescheduled to October 3-4 at USC.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian and Michael Toman for the story.]
