28th Annual Literary Awards Finalists Announced for April 25th Presentation
NEW YORK, Feb. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Maxine Hong Kingston has been named the
winner of the 28th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes' Robert Kirsch Award
for lifetime achievement.
The award was announced tonight along with the names of the 45 finalists
for the 2007 Book Prizes (http://www.latimes.com/extras/bookprizes/) during an
evening reception at the National Arts Club in New York City. Serving as
event hosts were Times Book Prizes Director Kenneth L. Turan and Times Book
Editor David L. Ulin.
The Book Prizes will be presented April 25th at UCLA's Royce Hall in Los
Angeles. In addition to the Kirsch Award, the evening will honor 2007's
outstanding books in nine categories: biography, current interest, fiction,
first fiction (the Art Seidenbaum Award), history, mystery/thriller, poetry,
science and technology, and young adult fiction.
The Kirsch Award honors a living author with a substantial connection to
the American West whose contribution to American letters deserves special
recognition and Maxine Hong Kingston has been named the award's 28th
recipient. Kingston is the acclaimed author of many books including the
award-winning The Woman Warrior, China Men and Tripmaster Monkey. She lives
in Oakland, California, with her husband Earl, where she is a Senior Lecturer
Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley and directs the Veterans
Writing Group project.
Presenting the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes
(http://www.latimes.com/extras/bookprizes/) will be Jim Newton (Biography),
Scott Simon (Current Interest), Ngugi Wa Thiong'O (Fiction), Susan Salter
Reynolds (First Fiction - the Art Seidenbaum Award), Douglas Brinkley
(History), Paula Woods (Mystery/Thriller), Mark Doty (Poetry), David L. Ulin
(the Robert Kirsch Award), Dava Sobel (Science and Technology) and Francesca
Lia Block (Young Adult Fiction).
The awards ceremony will lead off the 13th annual Los Angeles Times
Festival of Books (http://www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/), one of the
nation's premier public literary festivals and the largest of its kind on the
West Coast, held April 26-27 on the UCLA campus.
The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were established in 1980. Each Book
Prize includes a $1,000 cash award. The named awards commemorate the life and
work of Robert Kirsch, who served as The Times' book critic for more than 25
years prior to his death in 1980, and of the late Art Seidenbaum, who founded
the Book Prizes. Finalists were selected by eight three-member committees
(the fiction panel covers both the fiction and first fiction categories) and
most judges are published authors and serve a two-year term. None of the
judges, except for the Kirsch award, are current Los Angeles Times employees.
There is no nationality requirement for author nominees in any category. With
the exception of significant new translations of a deceased author's work, all
authors should be living at the time of U.S. publication.
2007 Book Prize Finalists
Biography
Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (Viking)
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer (Yale
University Press)
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (Alfred A. Knopf)
Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography (A Shannon Ravenel Book/Algonquin Books
of Chapel Hill)
Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Alfred
A. Knopf)
Current Interest
Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Sarah Crichton
Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Tom Bissell, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy
of Vietnam (Pantheon)
Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has
Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (The Penguin Press)
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company)
Elizabeth D. Samet, Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and
War at West Point (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Fiction
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books)
Andrew O'Hagan, Be Near Me (Harcourt)
Stewart O'Nan, Last Night at the Lobster (Viking)
Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses: A Novel (Graywolf Press)
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher: A Novel (Simon & Schuster)
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Antonia Arslan {Translated by Geoffrey Brock} Skylark Farm (Alfred A.
Knopf)
Rebecca Curtis, Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money (Harper
Perennial)
Pamela Erens, The Understory (Ironweed Press)
Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories (W.W.
Norton)
Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead Books)
History
David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of
Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin)
Margaret Macmillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World (Random
House)
Andrew Nagorski, Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow
that Changed the Course of World War II (Simon and Schuster)
Lynne Olson, Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to
Power and Helped Save England (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)
Mystery/Thriller
Benjamin Black, Christine Falls: A Novel (Henry Holt and Company)
Ake Edwardson, Frozen Tracks: An Inspector Erik Winter Novel (Viking)
Karin Fossum {Translated by Charlotte Barslund} The Indian Bride
(Harcourt)
Tana French, In the Woods (Viking)
Jan Costin Wagner {Translated by John Brownjohn} Ice Moon (Harcourt)
Poetry
Marvin Bell, Mars Being Red (Copper Canyon Press)
Elaine Equi, Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press)
Albert Goldbarth, The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007
(Graywolf Press)
Stanley Plumly, Old Heart: Poems (W.W. Norton)
Jean Valentine, Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press)
Science & Technology
James L. and Carol Grant Gould, Animal Architects: Building and the
Evolution of Intelligence (Basic Books)
Douglas Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop (Basic Books)
Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of
Language (Viking)
Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (University of California
Press)
Gino Segre, Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics
(Viking)
Young Adult Fiction
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little,
Brown Young Readers)
Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness (HarperTeen)
Walter Dean Myers, What They Found: Love on 145th Street (Wendy Lamb
Books/Random House)
Kenneth Oppel, Darkwing (Eos Books/HarperCollins)
Philip Reeve, A Darkling Plain (The Hungry City Chronicles) (Eos
Books/HarperCollins)
Information about the awards ceremony and the Book Prize awards program is
available at http://www.latimesbookprizes.com or by calling 1-800-LATIMES,
x72366.
About the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was created in 1996 to promote
literacy, celebrate the written word, and bring together those who create
books with the people who love to read them. Between 130,000 and 140,000
people attend the event annually.
General event information is available online at
http://latimesfestivalofbooks.com or by calling 1-800-LA TIMES, ext. 7BOOK.
Detailed speaker and event information will be provided in the official
festival program, which will be published in the April 20th edition of the Los
Angeles Times.
About the Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com) is the largest metropolitan
daily newspaper in the country, with a daily readership of 2.2 million and
3.2 million on Sunday, and a combined print and interactive monthly audience
of 4.9 million. The Los Angeles Times and its media businesses and affiliates
- including The Envelope (http://www.theenvelope.com), Metromix
(http://losangeles.metromix.com/), Times Community Newspapers, Hoy, and
California Community News - reach approximately 8.1 million or 62% of all
adults in the Southern California marketplace.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times, has been covering Southern
California for over 126 years and is part of Tribune Company, one of the
country's leading media companies with businesses in publishing, the Internet
and broadcasting. Additional information about the Los Angeles Times is
available at http://www.latimes.com/mediacenter.
SOURCE Los Angeles Times
Nancy Sullivan of Los Angeles Times, +1-213-237-6160,
nancy.sullivan@latimes.com
