Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Winners Announced

 

Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Winners Announced

An enigmatic story of art and life in Communist Bucharest, a debut novel set in a red-light district in Pakistan, a searing YA story set in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia — as well as reexaminations of J. Edgar Hoover, the Jim Crow era and more — are among the winners of the 43rd annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, awarded Friday evening during a ceremony at the University of Southern California’s Bovard Auditorium.

Among the winners were widely known historians and journalists, including Biography winner Beverly Gage, for “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century," which drew on new source material for a fresh new look at the notorious FBI director, and Dahlia Lithwick, whose “Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America,” won the Current Interest Prize.

In Mystery/Thriller, Alex Segura — best known as a writer of award-winning comics — won for his retro comic-artist crime novel, "Secret Identity."

“When I first started this book I thought oh this’ll be easy, I know comics,” Segura said, before adding that this was the most intense journalistic endeavor of his life.

Other categories helped to boost writers less familiar (at least to American readers). Mircea Cărtărescu took home the fiction prize for “Solenoid,” a Borgesian exploration of life and art in which various, monstrous dimensions erupt within Communist Romania. The history prize went to “By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners,” the first book by Margaret A. Burnham," a law professor and the founder of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project.

A few special prizes announced in advance also recognized household names of today as well as those of the future. James Ellroy, best known for his L.A.-based crime novels “L.A. Confidential” and “The Black Dahlia” — and most recently “Widespread Panic" — was honored with the 2022 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, an award which lauds an author whose work focuses on the American West.