Michelle Obama awards finalist
The finalists include Michelle Obama, Susan Orlean and Michael Ondaatje.
The former first lady, author of the memoir “Becoming,” is among 2018 L.A. Times Book Prize finalists.
Michelle Obama, Susan Orlean, Michael Ondaatje and Terrance Hayes are among the finalists for the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, according to an announcement Wednesday.
Winners of the annual literary awards will be announced at a ceremony at USC’s Bovard Auditorium on April 12, the day before the start of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which is scheduled for April 13-14 at USC.
Nominated books this year include former First Lady Obama’s memoir “Becoming” in the current interest category, where it will compete with Orlean’s “The Library Book” and Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk,” among others. The fiction finalists include Ondaatje’s “Warlight,” along with Rebecca Makkai’s “The Great Believers” and Tayari Jones’ “An American Marriage.”
Other notable nominees include Tara Westover’s “Educated” in the biography category; Tommy Orange’s “There There” in first fiction; Miriam Pawel’s “The Browns of California” in history; Megan Abbott’s “Give Me Your Hand” in mystery/ thriller; and Elizabeth Acevedo’s “The Poet X” in young adult literature.
The winners of three special awards have also been announced: The Robert Kirsch Award, a lifetime achievement prize given to a writer with a substantial connection to the American West, will go to Terry Tempest Williams, a nature writer and environmental activist whose most recent book, “The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks,” was published in 2016.
“Following a year of record-setting wildfires here in California, we felt the time was right to honor Terry Tempest Williams,” said Julia Turner, The Times’ deputy managing Editor for arts and entertainment.
“With issues of the environment and climate change becoming increasingly urgent, what better moment to recognize someone who has focused her creative life on writing about the land and fighting for environmental issues in the most elegant and articulate way?”
The nonprofit publisher the Library of America will receive the Innovator’s Award; previous honorees have included Margaret Atwood, LeVar Burton and James Patterson.
“We are really pleased to recognize the Library of America for the invaluable work it has done over nearly four decades to preserve our nation’s rich written heritage by showcasing literature in all its forms,” said Times film critic and Book Prizes director Kenneth Turan. “Their distinct black volumes are a sure signal to readers that they are getting the very best.”
Kiese Laymon will receive the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose for his book “Heavy: An American Memoir.”
The book was the winner of the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.
Rick Whitaker, one of the judges on the Isherwood Prize panel, said: “Laymon’s remarkable memoir about growing up black in America, published post-Obama, was without question the one we felt most urgently deserved the attention of American readers now. Its title is apt in so many ways: It refers to Laymon’s body, to his life, and to his writing, which does not flinch.”
Tickets for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes will go on sale March 7 at the Festival of Books website (events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/bookprizes/).