Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalists Announced; 21st Annual Literary Awards to Be Presented April 28 at UCLA's Royce Hall

Business Wire, April 11, 2001

Lifestyle & Book Editors

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books 2001

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 11, 2001

The 10 winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize will be announced Saturday, April 28, at a public ceremony beginning at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA's Royce Hall.

This year, The Times will award its first Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category.

The event is a highlight of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which will be held April 28-29 on the UCLA campus. Prize-winning author, KCRW-FM commentator and PRI contributor Sandra Tsing Loh will serve as emcee.

Tickets are $10 per person for the ceremony only and $50 per person for both the ceremony and a post-event buffet reception. Tickets may be purchased through the UCLA Box Office at 310/825-2101 or Ticketmaster at 213/365-3500. On-campus parking is $6.

The Book Prizes -- which include a $1,000 cash award -- are presented in nine categories: biography, current interest, fiction, first fiction, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, and young adult fiction. The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction commemorates the work of the late Times book editor and Book Prize program founder.

The winner of the annual Robert Kirsch Award will also be announced April 28. The award recognizes an author who resides in or whose work focuses on the Western United States. The award is named after the late Robert Kirsch, who served as The Times' book critic for more than 25 years prior to his death in 1980.

The 45 Book Prize finalists are:

Biography (Presenter: A. Scott Berg)

-- H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
(Doubleday)

-- William J. Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (Alfred A. Knopf)

-- Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Alfred A.
Knopf)

-- Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis (W.W. Norton)

-- Philip Short, Mao: A Life (a John Macrae Book, Henry Holt)

Current Interest (Presenter: John S. Carroll, editor, Los Angeles Times)

-- Ian Buruma, The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in

East and West (Random House)

-- Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star

Wars and the End of the Cold War (Simon & Schuster)

-- Sherwin B. Nuland, The Mysteries Within: A Surgeon Reflects on

Medical Myths (Simon & Schuster)

-- S.L. Price, Pitching around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of

Cuban Sports (HarperCollins/Ecco)

-- Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and

Journalists Devastated the Amazon (W.W. Norton)

Fiction (Presenter: Janet Fitch)

-- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A

Novel (Random House)

-- Peter Ho Davies, Equal Love: Stories (Houghton Mifflin)

-- David Means, Assorted Fire Events: Stories (Context Books)

-- Philip Roth, The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin)

-- Joy Williams, The Quick & the Dead (Alfred A. Knopf)

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (Presenter: Cristina Garcia)

-- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai: A Novel (Talk Miramax Books)

-- Matthew Klam, Sam the Cat and Other Stories (Random House)

-- Pankaj Mishra, The Romantics: A Novel (Random House)

-- Akhil Sharma, An Obedient Father (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

-- Zadie Smith, White Teeth: A Novel (Random House)

History (Presenter: Joyce Appleby)

-- Shareen Blair Brysac, Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and

the Red Orchestra (Oxford University Press)

-- Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (Yale University Press)

-- Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of

Robert Brasillach (University of Chicago Press)

-- Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of

Democracy in the United States (Basic Books)

-- Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of

the Whaleship Essex (Viking)

Mystery/Thriller (Presenter: Charles Champlin)

-- James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road: A Novel (Doubleday)

-- Michael Dibdin, Blood Rain: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (Pantheon)

-- Val McDermid, A Place of Execution: A Novel (St. Martin's

Press/Minotaur)

-- George P. Pelecanos, Shame the Devil: A Novel (Little, Brown)

-- Peter Robinson, Cold Is the Grave: A Novel of Suspense

(William Morrow)

Poetry (Presenter: Bei Ling)

-- Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (Alfred A. Knopf)

-- Michael Collier, The Ledge: Poems (Houghton Mifflin)

-- Nick Flynn, Some Ether (Graywolf Press)

-- Carl Phillips, Pastoral (Graywolf Press)

-- Gjertrud Schnackenberg, The Throne of Labdacus (Farrar, Straus

and Giroux)

Science and Technology (Presenter: David Baltimore)

-- David Bodanis, E=MC2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous

Equation (Walker and Company)

-- James Le Fanu, M.D., The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine

(Carroll & Graf)

-- Dennis Overbye, Einstein in Love (A Scientific Romance)

(Viking)

-- Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23

Chapters (HarperCollins)

-- Karl Sabbagh, A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Young Adult Fiction (Presenter: Michael Cart)

-- Adam Bagdasarian, Forgotten Fire (DK Publishing)

-- Carolyn Coman, Many Stones (Front Street)