Los Angeles Times
Kiese Laymon of Oxford, Mississippi, won the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose for Heavy: An American Memoir (Scribner). He received $10,000. Debby Applegate, Alex Espinoza, Victoria Redel, Diana Wagman, and Rick Whitaker judged. The annual award is given for a book of autobiographical prose. There is no application process.
ROBERT KIRSCH AWARD
Terry Tempest Williams of Castle Valley, Utah, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, won the 2018 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. Williams, whose most recent book is Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019), received $1,000. The annual award is given to recognize an author whose work
focuses on the West and “whose contributions to American letters deserve special recognition.” There is no application process.
BOOK PRIZES
Carl Phillips of Saint Louis won the
2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for Wild Is the Wind (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Rebecca Makkai of Chicago won the prize in fiction for her novel The Great Believers (Viking). Nafissa Thompson-Spires of Champaign, Illinois, won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction for her story collection, Heads of the Colored People (Atria/37 INK). Francisco Cantú of Tucson won the prize in current interest for his book, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border (Riverhead Books). They each received $500. David Baker, Cyrus Cassells, and Victoria Chang judged in poetry; Natashia Deon, Douglas Dutton, and Amy Wilentz judged in fiction; and Frances Dinkelspiel, Marcus Anthony Hunter, and Erin Aubry Kaplan judged in current interest. The annual awards are given for books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published in the previous year. The winners are nominated and selected by a panel of judges who work in the field in which they are a judge. There is no application process.
Los Angeles Times, 2300 East Imperial Highway, El Segundo, CA 90245. (800) 528-4637, ext. 75775. Ann Binney, Prize Administrator. ann.binney@latimes.com events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/bookprizes -2018/