Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Announced Amidst Covid-19 Pandemic

The Los Angeles Times announced the recipients of prizes over Twitter this year, due to social distancing restrictions. As Dorany Pineda notes, "the winners were uniformly grateful, but most of them were preoccupied with COVID-19 and its effect on humanity. Their books, their lives and the prizes themselves took on new meaning as the authors did what their books often do, attempting to make sense out of chaos and struggle." Winner in the Poetry category was Ilya Kaminsky for "Deaf Republic." More: 

“A mere few decades ago, this pandemic and the logical response to it would’ve been the subject of fiction,” said crime novelist Walter Mosley, winner of the 2019 Robert Kirsch Award for his contributions to the literature of the American West. “Today, the fiction writer has become part of his craft, the subject of his craft,” he said from “quasi-quarantine” in Santa Monica.

Marlon James, recipient of the Ray Bradbury Prize for his fantasy novel “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” highlighted the irony of winning an award that honors an author best known for “the original American dystopia,” “Fahrenheit 451,” during the global pandemic.

Sitting “literally in a bunker,” James said the circumstances made him think “even more about how we look at [Bradbury’s] dystopia as a possible future, not realizing [that] in a way it has happened. We’re not burning books, but we’re burning intelligence. We’re burning expertise. We’re burning the simple privilege of knowing and we’re seeing the consequence of that.”

George Packer received the biography prize for “Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.” He used his acceptance speech to speak of a political situation he believes worsened the crisis. The book, he said, is not just the story of “a flamboyant and brilliant and difficult man who served his country,” but a portrait of his time, “an era when the United States saw itself as an indispensable world leader, for better and for worse.”

Continue reading at the Los Angeles Times.