Finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced in 11 categories, including the new Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. Novelist Thomas McGuane will be given the 2016 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, which recognizes a writer whose work focuses on the American West. Winners will be celebrated April 21 at the University of Southern California on the eve of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
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The PEN American Center announced winners of the 2017 PEN Literary Awards. They will be honored March 27 in New York City at the annual awards ceremony, along with the winners of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, PEN/Nabokov Award, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. This year's PEN Literary Award honorees include:
PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction ($10,000): Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (Crown)
PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Awards ($7,500 and $2,500): Suzan-Lori Parks (Master American Dramatist), Tarell Alvin McCraney (American Playwright in Mid-Career), and Thomas Bradshaw (Emerging American Playwright)
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000): Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets by Luke Dittrich (Penguin Random House)
PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History ($10,000): How Did You Get Here?: Tales of Displacement by Aleksandar Hemon
PEN Open Book Award ($5,000): What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead)
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000): Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson (FSG)
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss (Portfolio/PRH)
PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): Bill Nack
PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry ($5,000): The Verging Cities by Natalie Scenters-Zapico (Center For Literary Publishing/Colorado State University)
PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship ($5,000): Finding a Home at the End of the World by Phillippe Diederich (work in progress)
PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap, translated from the German by Tess Lewis (Archipelago Books)
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): Pearl: A New Verse Translation by the Pearl Poet, translated from the Middle English by Simon Armitage (Liveright/Norton)
PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing ($2,500): Michael Archer and Joel Whitney for Guernica
PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature: Ithaca Forever by Luigi Malerba, translated by Douglas Heise