Finalists and honorees for the 46th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced last week. Amy Tan will be honored with the Robert Kirsch Award for her body of work on multicultural identity. Other recipients include We Need Diverse Books and Adam Ross.
The Los Angeles Times announced finalists and special honorees for its 46th annual Book Prizes last week. Among the special awards, author Amy Tan, known for her 1989 debut novel "The Joy Luck Club," will receive the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. This award recognizes literature with connections to the Western United States, highlighting Tan's exploration of multicultural identity and familial bonds. "Throughout her extraordinary career, Amy Tan has transformed American literature by shining a light on the emotional complexities of family, identity and cultural inheritance," said Sophia Kercher, Times senior editor for books. "Her work confronts the social and cultural legacies of the American West with rich details of the immigrant experience."
"The Joy Luck Club," which interweaves stories of Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters in San Francisco, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Tan's subsequent works, including her most recent 2024 book "The Backyard Bird Chronicles," have earned her induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Humanities Medal from President Joe Biden.
The Innovator’s Award goes to We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit that began as a 2014 Twitter campaign to promote diversity in children’s and young adult publishing. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, only 8% of U.S. children’s books were by authors of color at the nonprofit's launch, rising to 47% in 2023, aided by WNDB’s grants and advocacy. "We Need Diverse Books has played an important role in publishing by championing stories that reflect our world, and opening doors for writers and readers," said Times Executive Editor Terry Tang.
Novelist Adam Ross wins the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose for "Playworld," a semi-autobiographical novel about a teen in 1980s New York described as "less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation."
In biography, Ekow Eshun is a finalist for "The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them." Fiction finalists include Michael Connelly and Saou Ichikawa, whose debut "Hunchback" was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. Many books address contemporary issues like historical revisionism and AI proliferation.
Winners in 13 categories, selected by genre-specialist panels, will be revealed on April 17 at USC’s Bovard Auditorium, preceding the L.A. Times Festival of Books on April 18 and 19.
