Yesterday, the finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced—the rare prize that includes a science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction category. The SFF finalists are:
- Tananarive Due, The Reformatory: A Novel
- Daniel Kraus, Whalefall
- Victor LaValle, Lone Women: A Novel
- V. E. Schwab, The Fragile Threads of Power
- E. Lily Yu, Jewel Box: Stories
This year’s judges are Maurice Broaddus (author of Sweep of Stars), Craig Laurance Gidney (author of Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories), and Lucy A. Snyder (author of Sister, Maiden, Monster).
The Book Prize finalists are usually a fascinating bunch, and this year is no exception. Among the finalists in the other categories are a few other books that may be of interest to SFF readers, including Emily Carroll’s graphic novel A Guest in the House; the fantasy graphic novel Coda by Simon Spurrier and Matías Bergara; Jaime Green’s The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos; and Kelly & Zach Weinersmith’s A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose will, this year, go to Claire Dederer for the incredible Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, which the judges describe as “a book-length expansion of an essay on the problematic relationship between masculinity and fame, considers how we come to love art made by less-than-perfect humans … Dederer engages the essayist form at its best and the result is both critical, literary and provocative.”
The winners will be announced April 19th, during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
Congratulations to all the finalists!
