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.
Other categories helped to boost writers less familiar . 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.
The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose went to Javier Zamora, whose memoir, “Solito,” recounts histo the United States in 1999, when he was just 9-years-old. The Book Prizes ceremony is a prologue to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the nation’s largest literary and cultural festival, which brings together more than 500 writers, musicians, artists and chefs, hundreds of exhibitors and an estimated 150,000 attendees each year.
In Science and Technology, Sabrina Imbler was honored for “How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures,” which explores themes of survival and sexuality, community and care, while weaving the extraordinary world of marine biology with the author’s personal account of family and relationships.