The Los Angeles Times has announced the finalists for its 40th annual L.A. Times Book Prizes, which span awards for a bunch of different genres including Current Interest, Fiction, Graphic Novels, and History books published in 2019. This also marks the launch of the publication’s Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction. Sponsored by Ray Bradbury Literary Works, the prize “honors Bradbury’s literary legacy by celebrating writers working in his field today.”
Check out the nominees for this inaugural prize below!
Ted Chiang
Exhalation: Stories (Knopf)
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
This is How You Lose the Time War (Gallery / Saga Press)
Brian Evenson
Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press)
Marlon James
Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy) (Riverhead Books)
Namwali Serpell
The Old Drift: A Novel (Hogarth)
Serpell is also nominated for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
“Ray was a proud Angeleno who used words to both predict and prevent the future,” the author’s family said in a statement, according to the L.A. Times. “(T)his prize recognizes authors with a similar passion for storytelling and the far-reaching effects their words have in this world.”
Winners of the L.A. Times Book Prizes will be announced during a ceremony on April 17 to kick off the 25th annual Festival of Books, held on the University of Southern California’s campus between April 18-19, 2020. You can find a list of nominees for other L.A. Times Book Prizes here. Congratulations to all the nominees!
