L.A. Times Book Prize winners talk AI, book bans, diverse novels
Some of our finest contemporary writers got their laurels Friday night at the 46th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony at USC’s Bovard Auditorium.
At the awards ceremony, which opens the annual L.A. Times Festival of Books weekend, Oakland-born writer Amy Tan and literary nonprofit We Need Diverse Books received achievement honors, and finalists in 13 other categories became prize winners.
The presenters and awardees who took the stage balanced a spirit of playfulness — Times senior editor Sophia Kercher called the weekend’s festival “my personal Coachella” and Times columnist LZ Granderson saluted his fellow “booktroverts” — and one of reverence as they celebrated writing as an instrument for advocacy, imagination and history-keeping.
As Bench Ansfield virtually accepted his award in the history category for “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City,” which exposes a pattern of landlords setting residential fires to collect insurance payouts, he said, “It’s a scary time to be a historian in the United States.”
“Our field, like so many other fields, is under attack,” Ansfield said. “To understand the crises in front of us, we have to understand our history.”
Among the crises highlighted was AI encroachment, the subject of science and technology category winner Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.” The AI expert and investigative journalist’s book is a critical investigation into the rise of OpenAI and its impact on society.
In Hao’s acceptance speech, read by presenter Jia-Rui Cook in her absence, the author said she “can’t help but be disturbed by how the themes of this book have grown more relevant by the day.”
“That said, I have never been more hopeful of our chance to advance a different future,” the author said, adding that L.A.’s history of resistance movements — including the recent Hollywood strikes — made it an apt place to accept her award.
“Gatherings like this are one of many radical acts of resistance against the imperial project that seeks to strip us of our meaning and our humanity,” Hao said. “Let us continue to resist defiantly together and let us remember lessons in history: When people rise, empires always fall.”
Tan echoed Hao’s sentiments as she accepted the Robert Kirsch Award, which celebrates literature with regional and thematic connections to the Western United States, for her acclaimed portfolio of writing exploring identity and cultural inheritance — often through the lens of the immigrant experience.
In her speech, “The Joy Luck Club” writer said that while she never particularly considered herself a “political writer,” her stance on that has changed as government actions have made her think critically about her own identities.
“My birthright and that of millions of others is now being argued before the Supreme Court, and no matter what the outcome is, it’s been a kick in the gut to know that those in the highest echelons of government and those who support them believe that we don’t belong.”
As an author, Tan said, “I imagine the lives of the people I write about,” and that act of compassion, for writers, inherently “reflects our politics and our beliefs. And so yes, I am a political writer.”
Later, Caroline Richmond, executive director of We Need Diverse Books, celebrated the work of her nonprofit — the recipient of this year’s Innovator’s Award — which has made it so her daughter “has never really had to look that far to find herself on the page.”
Still, she said ongoing book bans are threatening those strides toward a more diverse literary marketplace.
“The work is very much far from over,” Richmond said, “but I have to remind myself that the people banning books are never the good guys in history, and it’s up to us in this room and beyond — as readers, as book lovers — to fight back because diverse books, we really need them now more than ever.”
As the ceremony wore on, the room was as charged with celebration as it was with resistance.
When writer-editor and former child actor Adam Ross accepted the Christopher Isherwood Prize for “Playworld,” a semi-autobiographical novel about a teen growing up in 1980s New York, he gleamed with joy about his second novel being out in the world and finding readers.
“When it became clear to me that I was writing something that was going to be a lot bigger and take a lot longer than I planned, I promised myself I would use all of my ability to capture my experience of a particular era in an enduringly magical city, and to hopefully express it in such a way that any reader willing to embark on a journey with me, but upon finishing close the book and say, ‘Yes, I know exactly what that was like,’” Ross said in his acceptance speech.
“Winning this award makes me feel like I succeeded in that endeavor,” the author said.
Other winners included Ekow Eshun, who topped the biography category for “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them,” which parses Black masculinity as embodied by various civil rights activists, philosophers and other visionaries, and Bryan Washington, who accepted the fiction award for “Palaver,” which details the tense reunion of a Jamaican-born mother and her queer son, who are navigating years of estrangement in Tokyo.
The 31st annual L.A. Times Festival of Books will host 500-plus authors and celebrities and 300-plus exhibitors across more than 200 events including panels, book signings and cooking demonstrations. Top-billed guests include musician-memoirist Lionel Richie, veteran actor and recent Golden Globe Carol Burnett Award honoree Sarah Jessica Parker, and the mastermind behind “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David.
The schedule for the Saturday-Sunday event can be found here.
Here’s the full list of finalists and winners for the Book Prizes.
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” | WINNER
Saou Ichikawa translated by Polly Barton, “Hunchback: A Novel”
Achievement in 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 in 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” | WINNER
Biography
Joe Dunthorne, “Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance”
Ekow Eshun, “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them” | WINNER
Ruth Franklin, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank”
Beth Macy, “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America”
Amanda Vaill, “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in 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 in America” | WINNER
Gardiner Harris, “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson”
Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in 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” | WINNER
Graphic Novel/Comics
Eagle Valiant Brosi, “Black Cohosh”
Jaime Hernandez, “Life Drawing: A Love and Rockets Collection” | WINNER
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 in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City” | WINNER
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 in Postwar America”
Mystery/Thriller
Megan Abbott, “El Dorado Drive” | WINNER
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” | WINNER
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” | WINNER
Science & Technology
Mariah Blake, “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in 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 in Sam Altman’s OpenAI” | WINNER
Laura Poppick, “Strata: Stories from Deep Time”
Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in 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” | WINNER
Hannah V. Sawyerr, “Truth Is: A Novel in Verse”