The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced during a virtual ceremony today. Among the winners in 14 categories were short story writer Deesha Philyaw, journalist Isabel Wilkerson, poet Victoria Chang, biographer William Souder and French novelist David Diop. Stephen Graham Jones won the second Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.
For the second consecutive year, the prizes which traditionally kick off The Times weekend-long Festival of Books were awarded without an IRL event due to the pandemic. Times book editor Boris Kachka emceed the virtual awards, and winners gave pre-recorded video speeches.
Philyaw, whose debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was a National Book Award finalist and won the PEN/Faulkner award, took home the Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction. She will join authors Ben Okri, Carribean Fragoza and Shruti Swamy on Friday for a Book Fest panel about short stories.
Judges called the book a remarkable debut collection of stories ... fiercely Black and beautiful, which linger in the mind long after we read them... It announces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.
In her speech, Philyaw said she wrote the book in hopes that Black women would see and hear themselves in my characters and their stories. I wrote it to be a balm, an affirmation, a celebration and a guidepost for getting free. In what has been a devastation year, were all looking for comfort, solace and healing, all of which we can find in the shelter of each other and in books.
Wilkerson was awarded the current interest prize for Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a powerful study of Americas age-old caste system that became a bestseller after last years Black Lives Matter protests.
This book was a quest for understanding, Wilkerson said in her speech. It required me to travel between three different continents and to study and to learn and to distill and synthesize the history and the culture of three different countries in order to better understand our own. She called her work a book written by an American, for Americans, about America at a time of existential crisis.
In the fiction category, Diop won for At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel, translated by Anna Moschovakis.
Stephen Graham Jones, winner of the 2020 Ray Bradbury Prize for his horror novel The Only Good Indians.
(Gary Isaacs)
Dark, gruesome, vivid, utterly compelling, At Night All Blood Is Black, a war story of racism, colonialism, violence, fear, and madness, is ultimately about the power of storytelling and how stories get told (or very often dont), judges said, adding, we have never read anything like him.
Of Changs Obit, winner in the poetry category, Judge Cyrus Cassells said, innovative poetic obituaries speak to us in a startling way about death and loss with surprising, sometimes surreal juxtapositions of image that never let the riveted reader settle into one groove.
Chang devoted some of her speech to decrying recent waves of violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. In a time when so many Asian Americans and those from other marginalized communities still face daily violence, racism and misogyny, I feel particularly moved to be nominated, she said. She wrote the book when she felt most alone, she added, traveling on a raft at sea uncertain if I could find my way back. I wrote this book for myself, the book that I most needed during a time of grieving.
The prize for mystery/thriller went to S.A. Cosby for Blacktop Wasteland, the noir tale of a Virginia family man pushed to the edge by poverty, racism and his previous life of crime. Judges said it reflects concerns of the 21st century through a gripping plot accented by fully fleshed-out characters with realistic motives.
In history, Martha S. Jones took the prize for Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.
I wrote Vanguard because its the book that I needed to read in 2020, Jones said in her speech. Mindful of the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment, Jones said she wanted to ensure that Black womens roles in that struggle were not overlooked. What I couldnt have anticipated was the extraordinary range of consequential roles that Black women would play in the 2020 election cycle.
Previously announced winners were also celebrated during the ceremony: the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helped many bookstores during the pandemic, won the Innovators Award; Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko took the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. Andrew OHagan was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose for his coming-of-age novel Mayflies, the bittersweet tale of a friendship cemented in the New Wave 1980s on an epic trip to Manchester, England.
Robert Kirsch Award winner Leslie Marmon Silko.
(Penguin Classics)
When I set out to write Mayflies, I knew from the start that it would be not only an intimate book but my most autobiographical, OHagan said in a speech recorded in London. My dying friend and I came up with a pact that I would write a novel about our childhood and about the last year of his life. It came from the heart; some books just do.
Diana Wagman, a judge in the category, called Mayflies an easy choice among the many submissions for the award.
The memoirist and novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, who accepted the Robert Kirsch Award on behalf of her good friend Silko, recalled their own epic trip to China alongside the late literary giants Allen Ginsberg and Toni Morrison. Your earring beads were the exact colors and shapes on the columns of temples: red, green, blue and white, Kingston recalled, addressing Silko.
Youre not only a writer, Leslie, you are a sybil. An oracle. A prophet. You suffered from visions of the U.S. military and weapons at the Mexican border. Today, we could see that those omens have come true.
Below is the full list of 2020 winners:
Go here to see the original:
Winners of the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prizes announced - Los Angeles Times
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- Abenaa Jones named Ann Atherton Hertzler Early Career Professor - Pennsylvania State University - August 6th, 2022 [August 6th, 2022]
- City of Detroit, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, join the Black Theatre Network (BTN) to host Broadway Comes Home to Detroit, a... - July 25th, 2022 [July 25th, 2022]
- California Senate Votes to Keep Legalized Slavery in its Prisons - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis - June 29th, 2022 [June 29th, 2022]
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- Introducing the Truckstop.com Partner Marketplace: A Comprehensive Transportation and Logistics Ecosystem Empowering the Freight Community - Yahoo... - June 29th, 2022 [June 29th, 2022]
- A Pilgrimage to the Birthplace of the Modern Womens Rights Movement - AFAR Media - June 29th, 2022 [June 29th, 2022]
- White Child Adopted by Black Reality TV Star Beaten to Death - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
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- Down 15% in 2022, is it time to jump on Vanguard Australian Shares Index ETF? - The Motley Fool Australia - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- LIVE BLOG: 2022 Corps at the Crest - San Diego - FloMarching - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- Greater Sacramento Attends Bio International Convention in San Diego - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- Vanguard International Semiconductor : VIS and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Cofound Intelligent Manufacturing and Management Laboratory -... - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- The Shadow Of June 12 - The Left and Nigeria's Democratic Revolution, By Baba Aye - SaharaReporters.com - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- Yolo County Honors Juneteenth with Celebration - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- Commentary: Why San Francisco May Not Be the Best Test Case for Progressivism - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- As tennis fans gather Wimbledon worries expansion won't get over the line - The National - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- Vanguard Charitable survey: More than 1 in 3 American donors gave half or more of their charitable contributions to disaster relief efforts in the... - May 20th, 2022 [May 20th, 2022]
- National Grid warns on cost-of-living challenges after strong profit (NYSE:NGG) - Seeking Alpha - May 20th, 2022 [May 20th, 2022]
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- Student Opinion: The Biden Administration and Cable Companies Working Together to Bring Internet to Millions of Households - The Peoples Vanguard of... - May 20th, 2022 [May 20th, 2022]
- THE POWER OF LEADERSHIP - THISDAY Newspapers - May 20th, 2022 [May 20th, 2022]
- Vanguard may be shorting much vaunted 'owners' of its low-cost index funds as it upshifts to more Wall Street-style exec-comp tactics to thwart... - May 17th, 2022 [May 17th, 2022]
- Opinion | BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Control a Piece of Nearly Everything - The New York Times - May 17th, 2022 [May 17th, 2022]
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- Satellites, the Space Race, and Supercomputing: How NASA Goddard's Beowulf Cluster Computer Became an Award-Winning Space Technology - NASA (.gov) - May 17th, 2022 [May 17th, 2022]
- Vanguard may be shorting much vaunted 'owners' of its low-cost index funds as it shifts to Wall Street-style exec-comp tactics to thwart competitors... - May 15th, 2022 [May 15th, 2022]
- Senate Democrats Fail to Codify Abortion Rights; Don't Have Votes to Overcome Filibuster Dem Manchin Votes with GOP - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis - May 15th, 2022 [May 15th, 2022]
- The School Buzz: Vanguard rocketry team competing for national title - KRDO - May 9th, 2022 [May 9th, 2022]
- The Anglo-Indian-Nigerian designer at the vanguard of British fashion - The National - May 9th, 2022 [May 9th, 2022]
- Candidate for Yolo County District Attorney Cynthia Rodriguez Announced Her Growing List of Endorsements in a Press Release on Thursday - The Peoples... - May 9th, 2022 [May 9th, 2022]
- Commentary: Trends Are Pushing Tech, Housing Toward Sacramento Region - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis - May 9th, 2022 [May 9th, 2022]
- UK Government announces 2 billion investment into nuclear submarines - The National - May 9th, 2022 [May 9th, 2022]
- Workers grapple with new stresses as they return to office - Tampa Bay Times - May 9th, 2022 [May 9th, 2022]
- Who is Ib Kamara, the new Off-White art director to fill Virgil Abloh's shoes? - The National - May 9th, 2022 [May 9th, 2022]
- Vanguard Lions Defeat Statesmen To End The Year - Victory Sports Network - April 15th, 2022 [April 15th, 2022]
- Other days - Arkansas Online - April 15th, 2022 [April 15th, 2022]
- Democrats are in danger of losing three congressional strongholds in South Texas - Standard-Times - April 15th, 2022 [April 15th, 2022]
- Remembering the WNBA's Portland Fire - Vanguard - Psuvanguard.com - April 13th, 2022 [April 13th, 2022]
- Honoring the life of Amara Marluke - Vanguard - Psuvanguard.com - April 13th, 2022 [April 13th, 2022]
- The grim outlook of owning and renting - Vanguard - Psuvanguard.com - April 13th, 2022 [April 13th, 2022]
- 2022 NAIA Women's Outdoor Track & Field Rating Index Week 3 - U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association - April 13th, 2022 [April 13th, 2022]
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- Russias Invasion of Ukraine and Implications for the Korean Peninsula - Council on Foreign Relations - March 8th, 2022 [March 8th, 2022]
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- Barry Harris, Pianist and Devoted Scholar of Bebop, Dies at 91 - The New York Times - December 10th, 2021 [December 10th, 2021]
- From Our Archives: a Profile of Bob Dole, Once the Senate's "Funniest Member" - Washingtonian - December 7th, 2021 [December 7th, 2021]
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- Opinion | The Trump Conspiracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight - The New York Times - December 5th, 2021 [December 5th, 2021]
- The forgotten importance of the War of Jenkins' Ear - The Economist - December 5th, 2021 [December 5th, 2021]
- What Conservative Critics of Higher Education Share - The Atlantic - December 5th, 2021 [December 5th, 2021]
- The Unite the Right trial is exposing the chasm between who plans White nationalism's battles and who does the fighting - ABC17News.com - November 19th, 2021 [November 19th, 2021]
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- Abu Dhabi to Welcome Two New Museums in Addition to Guggenheim and Zayed - Artforum - November 19th, 2021 [November 19th, 2021]
- Gauteng government at the vanguard of SAs green economy plans - Business Day - November 17th, 2021 [November 17th, 2021]
- 25 years of school and family connections | Hub - The Hub at Johns Hopkins - November 17th, 2021 [November 17th, 2021]
- Opinion: Organized crime is a top driver of global deforestation and climate change - Houston Chronicle - November 17th, 2021 [November 17th, 2021]
- Letters to the editor: Lend a hand to these family caregivers - Austin American-Statesman - November 15th, 2021 [November 15th, 2021]
- University of Chicago to award four honorary degrees at 2022 Convocation - UChicago News - November 9th, 2021 [November 9th, 2021]