Los Angeles Times Book Prizes

The 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes will be presented on Friday, April 19, 2013. The 2012 Book Prizes Innovator’s Award Winner, Robert Kirsch Award Winner, and category finalists as listed below were announced publicly on February 21st, 2013, in advance of the April 19th ceremony.

See previous years' winners and more.

2012 Innovator’s Award Recipient

Margaret Atwood › 

2012 Kirsch Award Recipient

Kevin Starr ›

Biography

• H.W. Brands / The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace (Doubleday)
• Robert Caro / The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)
• Alice Kessler-Harris / A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (Bloomsbury Press)
• David Nasaw / The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (Penguin Press)
• R.J. Smith / The One: The Life and Music of James Brown(Gotham Books)

Current Interest

• Katherine Boo / Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
• Steve Coll / Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (Penguin Press)
• Karen Elliott House / On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines – and Future (Knopf)
• Jim Sterba / Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds(Crown)
• Jake Tapper / The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (Little, Brown and Company)

Fiction

• Jami Attenberg / The Middlesteins: A Novel (Grand Central Publishing)
• Michael Chabon / Telegraph Avenue (HarperCollins Publishers / Harper)
• Ben Fountain / Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk(HarperCollins Publishers / Ecco)
• Lauren Groff / Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion)
• Lydia Millet / Magnificence (W.W. Norton & Company)

Graphic Novel/Comics

• Alison Bechdel / Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Leela Corman / Unterzakhn (Schocken)
• Sammy Harkham / Everything Together: Collected Stories(PictureBox)
• Spain Rodriguez / Cruisin’ With the Hound: The Life and Times of Fred Toote (Fantagraphics)
• Chris Ware / Building Stories (Pantheon)

History

• John Barry / Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty(Viking)
• George Black / Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone (St. Martin’s Press)
• Fergus M. Bordewich / America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union (Simon & Schuster)
• Amy S. Greenberg / A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (Knopf)
• Geoffrey Kabaservice / Rule & Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford University Press)

Mystery / Thriller

• Tana French / Broken Harbor (Viking)
• Nick Harkaway / Angelmaker (Knopf)
• Fuminori Nakamura / The Thief (Soho Crime)
• Chris Pavone / The Expats (Crown)
• Ariel S. Winter / The Twenty-Year Death (Hard Case Crime)

Poetry

• Louise Glück / Poems 1962-2012 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Rowan Ricardo Phillips / The Ground: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• D. A. Powell / Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys: Poems (Graywolf Press)
• Bin Ramke / Aerial (Omnidawn)
• Cole Swensen / Gravesend (New California Poetry) (University of California Press)

Science & Technology

• Susan Cain / Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Crown)
• George Dyson / Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Pantheon)
• Jonathan Gottschall / The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Nate Silver / The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t (Penguin Press)
• Florence Williams / Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History(W.W. Norton & Company)

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

• David Abrams / Fobbit (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, Inc.)
• Kevin P. Keating / The Natural Order of Things (Aqueous Books)
• Lydia Netzer / Shine Shine Shine (St. Martin’s Press)
• Maggie Shipstead / Seating Arrangements (Knopf)
• Robin Sloan / Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book Store: A Novel(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Young Adult Literature

• Paolo Bacigalupi / The Drowned Cities (Little, Brown Books For Young Readers)
• A.S. King / Ask the Passengers (Little, Brown Books For Young Readers)
• Martine Leavitt / My Book of Life by Angel (Margaret Ferguson Books/Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers)
• Matthew Quick / Boy 21 (Little, Brown Books For Young Readers)
• Elizabeth Wein / Code Name Verity (Disney-Hyperion)