Some of our finest contemporary writers got their laurels Friday night at the 46th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony at USC\u2019s Bovard Auditorium.<\/p>\n
At the awards ceremony, which opens the annual L.A. Times Festival of Books<\/a> weekend, Oakland-born writer Amy Tan and literary nonprofit We Need Diverse Books received achievement honors, and finalists in 13 other categories<\/a> became prize winners. <\/p>\n The presenters and awardees who took the stage balanced a spirit of playfulness \u2014 Times senior editor Sophia Kercher called the weekend\u2019s festival \u201cmy personal Coachella\u201d and Times columnist LZ Granderson saluted his fellow \u201cbooktroverts\u201d \u2014 and one of reverence as they celebrated writing as an instrument for advocacy, imagination and history-keeping. <\/p>\n As Bench Ansfield virtually accepted their award in the history category for \u201cBorn in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City,\u201d which exposes a pattern of landlords setting residential fires to collect insurance payouts, they said, \u201cIt\u2019s a scary time to be a historian in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur field, like so many other fields, is under attack,\u201d Ansfield said. \u201cTo understand the crises in front of us, we have to understand our history.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the crises highlighted was AI encroachment, the subject of science and technology category winner Karen Hao\u2019s \u201cEmpire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman\u2019s OpenAI.\u201d The AI expert and investigative journalist\u2019s book is a critical investigation into the rise of OpenAI and its impact on society. <\/p>\n In Hao\u2019s acceptance speech, read by presenter Jia-Rui Cook in her absence, the author said she \u201ccan\u2019t help but be disturbed by how the themes of this book have grown more relevant by the day.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThat said, I have never been more hopeful of our chance to advance a different future,\u201d the author said, adding that L.A.\u2019s history of resistance movements \u2014 including the recent Hollywood strikes \u2014 made it an apt place to accept her award. <\/p>\n \u201cGatherings like this are one of many radical acts of resistance against the imperial project that seeks to strip us of our meaning and our humanity,\u201d Hao said. \u201cLet us continue to resist defiantly together and let us remember lessons in history: When people rise, empires always fall.\u201d<\/p>\n Tan echoed Hao\u2019s sentiments as she accepted the Robert Kirsch Award, which celebrates literature with regional and thematic connections to the Western United States, for her acclaimed portfolio of writing exploring identity and cultural inheritance \u2014 often through the lens of the immigrant experience.<\/p>\n In her speech, \u201cThe Joy Luck Club\u201d writer said that while she never particularly considered herself a \u201cpolitical writer,\u201d her stance on that has changed as government actions have made her think critically about her own identities.<\/p>\n \u201cMy birthright and that of millions of others is now being argued before the Supreme Court, and no matter what the outcome is, it\u2019s been a kick in the gut to know that those in the highest echelons of government and those who support them believe that we don\u2019t belong.\u201d <\/p>\n As an author, Tan said, \u201cI imagine the lives of the people I write about,\u201d and that act of compassion, for writers, inherently \u201creflects our politics and our beliefs. And so yes, I am a political writer.\u201d <\/p>\n Later, Caroline Richmond, executive director of We Need Diverse Books, celebrated the work of her nonprofit \u2014 the recipient of this year\u2019s Innovator\u2019s Award \u2014 which has made it so her daughter \u201chas never really had to look that far to find herself on the page.\u201d <\/p>\n Still, she said ongoing book bans are threatening those strides toward a more diverse literary marketplace. <\/p>\n \u201cThe work is very much far from over,\u201d Richmond said, \u201cbut I have to remind myself that the people banning books are never the good guys in history, and it\u2019s up to us in this room and beyond \u2014 as readers, as book lovers \u2014 to fight back because diverse books, we really need them now more than ever.\u201d <\/p>\n As the ceremony wore on, the room was as charged with celebration as it was with resistance. <\/p>\n When writer-editor and former child actor Adam Ross accepted the Christopher Isherwood Prize for \u201cPlayworld,\u201d a semi-autobiographical novel about a teen growing up in 1980s New York, he gleamed with joy about his second novel being out in the world and finding readers.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen it became clear to me that I was writing something that was going to be a lot bigger and take a lot longer than I planned, I promised myself I would use all of my ability to capture my experience of a particular era in an enduringly magical city, and to hopefully express it in such a way that any reader willing to embark on a journey with me would upon finishing, close the book and say, \u2018Yes, I know exactly what that was like,\u2019\u201d Ross said in his acceptance speech. <\/p>\n \u201cWinning this award makes me feel like I succeeded in that endeavor,\u201d the author said. <\/p>\n Other winners included Ekow Eshun, who topped the biography category for \u201cThe Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them,\u201d<\/a> which parses Black masculinity as embodied by various civil rights activists, philosophers and other visionaries, and Bryan Washington, who accepted the fiction award for \u201cPalaver,\u201d which details the tense reunion of a Jamaican-born mother and her queer son, who are navigating years of estrangement in Tokyo.<\/p>\n The 31st annual L.A. Times Festival of Books will host 500-plus authors and celebrities and 300-plus exhibitors across more than 200 events including panels, book signings and cooking demonstrations. Top-billed guests<\/a> include musician-memoirist Lionel Richie, veteran actor and recent Golden Globe Carol Burnett Award<\/a> honoree Sarah Jessica Parker, and the mastermind behind \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm,\u201d Larry David. <\/p>\n