LA Times Book Prizes
- The 46th L.A. Times Book Prizes were presented during the Festival of Books weekend at USC, with winners addressing AI and book bans. - Author Amy Tan was honored and the organization 'We Need Diverse Books' received recognition at the ceremony hosted by LZ Granderson. - Coverage stressed festival conversations about diversity, censorship, and AI across the awards program and panel lineup. (latimes.com, thelagosreview.ng)
The 46th L.A. Times Book Prizes opened Festival of Books weekend on April 17 at USC, where winners used the stage to talk about artificial intelligence and book bans. (latimes.com) The ceremony started at 7 p.m. at Bovard Auditorium on the University of Southern California campus, two days before the April 18-19 festival. Los Angeles Times columnist LZ Granderson hosted. (latimes.com) The prizes recognized books published in 2025 across 13 competitive categories, and the program also included three special honors. Amy Tan received the Robert Kirsch Award, We Need Diverse Books received the Innovator’s Award, and Adam Ross won the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose for “Playworld.” (thelagosreview.ng) The event landed in a book world that has spent the past year arguing over how artificial intelligence is used in writing and audio production, and over efforts to remove books from schools and libraries. The Times’ coverage said those fights shaped both acceptance speeches and festival programming. (latimes.com) That framing also matched the larger festival around it. The 2026 Festival of Books advertised more than 500 authors and celebrities, more than 200 events, and about 150,000 attendees on the USC campus. (latimes.com) Amy Tan’s award placed one of California’s best-known novelists at the center of the weekend. The Robert Kirsch Award honors a writer with a substantial connection to the American West, and the Times cited Tan’s work on Chinese American family life, including “The Joy Luck Club,” “The Kitchen God’s Wife” and “The Bonesetter’s Daughter.” (latimes.com) We Need Diverse Books was honored for work that began with a 2014 social media hashtag and grew into mentorships, workshops, grants and professional development programs in publishing. The Times said the nonprofit also works with educators and libraries on representation in books and the publishing pipeline. (latimes.com) The Book Prizes are now in their 46th year, and the festival that surrounds them is in its 31st. This year’s opening-night message was that literary awards are not only about craft, but also about who gets published, who gets read and which books remain on shelves. (latimes.com)
