The Los Angeles Times revealed the shortlists for its annual book prizes and announced the winners of three special awards. Joy Williams, Mariana Enríquez, Malinda Lo, and Joceyln Nicole Johnson are among the authors in contention for this year’s prizes.
Williams was named a finalist in the fiction category for Harrow, along with Enríquez for The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, translated by Megan McDowell. Williams’ novel won the 2021 Kirkus Prize, while Enríquez’s book was a finalist. Other books on the L.A. Times fiction shortlist are Claire Vaye Watkins’ I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s American Estrangement, and Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men.
Lo’s National Book Award–winning Last Night at the Telegraph Club made the shortlist for young adult literature, along with Darcie Little Badger’s A Snake Falls to Earth, Kekla Magoon’s Revolution in Our Time, Paula Yoo’s From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry, and Rita Williams-Garcia’s A Sitting in St. James.
Johnson’s My Monticello, a Kirkus Prize finalist, is shortlisted for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, as is Jackie Polzin’s Brood, Natasha Brown’s Assembly, Thomas Grattan’s The Recent East, and Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand the World, translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Author Luis J. Rodriguez (From Our Land to Our Land) was named the winner of the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, and poet and Freedom Reads founding director Reginald Dwayne Betts won the Innovator’s Award. Deborah Levy was honored with the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose for her memoir Real Estate.
The winners of this year’s awards will be revealed during a ceremony at the University of Southern California on April 22.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
