Los Angeles Times Book Prizes: The Winners

The Los Angeles Festival of Books is one of the largest book festivals and perhaps one of the most important book events in the U.S. It’s hosted by the University of Southern California (USC) and, as part of its program, includes the Los Angeles Times book prizes ceremony. During the ceremony, the winners of the Los Angeles Times book prizes receive awards in different literary categories (fiction, poetry, history, graphic novel/comics, etc.).

The works featured in the Los Angeles Festival of Books aren’t limited to just student books, but showcasing young authors’ work is a big part of the Festival’s purpose. It’s a chance for readers and USC students to hear new voices and discover new names in the literary scene that might one day become the next Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, or Zadie Smith.

Asna Tabassum

Asna Tabassum is a recent graduate of USC who majored in biomedical engineering with a minor in resistance to genocide. Asna was supposed to give a valedictorian speech at her graduation, but was silenced by the university because of her vocal support for Palestine.

During the Los Angeles book prizes ceremony, several winners mentioned Asna Tabassum when receiving their awards. In particular, Emily Carroll - awarded for their graphic novel A Guest in the House - appealed to USC, demanding that Asna get to give the speech she was supposed to. Tananarive Due, the winner of the fantasy category, also expressed her support for the political activism of Asna and other young people.

Amber McBride

Another author who displayed her solidarity with Asna Tabassum was Amber McBride. The speech she gave after receiving the award ended with, “Free Palestine.”

Amber McBride, an assistant professor of Poetry and English at the University of Virginia, won the young adult category with her novel Gone Wolf. The book features a dual timeline and tells two seemingly separate stories - one set during the COVID-19 pandemic and another in the year 2111, but both deal with intergenerational trauma and reflect on what it means to be a Black person living in the U.S.

Gone Wolf isn’t Amber McBride’s first book. The author is perhaps best known for her verse novel Me (Moth), McBride’s debut work that won the John Steptoe New Talent Award. Despite different genres, Me (Moth) and Gone Wolf share a clear thematic connection and display the leitmotifs of McBride’s work.

Emily Carroll

Emily Carroll, who now goes by E.M. Carroll, won the Los Angeles book prize in the graphic novel/comic category for A Guest in the House. The graphic novel is hard to fit neatly into a specific genre, but it includes the elements of horror, mystery, and even dark comedy - exactly the combination featured in Carroll’s debut work, Through the Woods.

A Guest in the House was well-received (particularly its visuals) when it first came out in 2023 and currently has a 4.05 rating on Goodreads, which suggests that it’s worth a read, at least for everyone who enjoys graphic novels. However, keep in mind that if you are not a fan of ambiguous endings, the way A Guest in the House ends might frustrate you.

Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due, the daughter of the well-known civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, is one of the more established recipients of the Los Angeles Book Prize this time. She already has more than fifteen published novels, as well as two graphic novels, and a few other works. Like Amber McBride, Due is a professor; she teaches a course on Black horror movies at UCLA.

The novel that Tananarive Due was awarded for is The Reformatory. Inspired by the Florida School for Boys reform school, the book tells the story of Robert, a 12-year-old black boy in 1950s Florida who gets sent to the reformatory for something he didn’t do. The Reformatory can be described both as a horror book and as historical fiction, which is a fitting combination, considering the central theme of the story - corruption within the American justice system.

Roxanna Asgarian

Among the lesser-known winners is Roxanna Asgarian, who was awarded the Current Interest prize for her work We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America. Unlike other authors on this list, Asgarian writes non-fiction. She is an independent journalist who used to work as a courts reporter and now mostly focuses on topics related to the criminal legal system.

We Were Once a Family focuses on the children who were killed in the Hart family murders that took place in 2018 in California, and ended with the deaths of two parents and their six adopted children. However, Asgarian focuses specifically on the birth families of the adopted Hart children. The author also explores the failures of the foster care system and child protective services that were partly to blame for what happened to the victims of the Hart family murders.

Ivy Pochoda

The winner of the mystery/thriller category is Ivy Pochoda with the book Sing Her Down: A Novel. The Los Angeles review of the novel calls it a “female-rage thriller,” which is a fitting name. The two protagonists of the story - who meet as inmates at an Arizona prison - might not always be right, but they are definitely justified in their anger toward a system that continually works against them and drives them to push back.

Sing Her Down is hard to categorize, both in terms of genre and theme. It contains elements of a procedural, a mystery, and even an apocalyptic road story. But what makes the book so compelling is the dynamic between the two protagonists who have a complicated cat-and-mouse relationship. Anyone who enjoyed Killing Eve will probably love Sing Her Down, too.

Ed Park

Finally, Ed Park, an ex-Amazon Publishing and Penguin Press editor who is now teaching at Princeton University, won the Los Angeles Times prize in the fiction category. Park’s winning book, Same Bed Different Dreams, is the author’s second novel. It’s a speculative fiction story that focuses on the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), Korea’s government-in-exile during Japan’s occupation of Korea in 1910-1945.

Park’s novel isn’t just for alternate history lovers, though. Same Bed Different Dreams is a dual-timeline story: the protagonist, Soon Sheen, lives in the 2015 U.S., and comes across a book about KPG named Same Bed Different Dreams. So, just like the protagonist, the reader has to navigate two different worlds and timelines simultaneously.

With Same Bed Different Dreams being Park’s second novel, the author might not be as prolific as some of his colleagues on this list. However, this isn’t a reason not to read the work. The novel was well-received by critics and readers alike and was even shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.

Why Attend Events Like the Los Angeles Festival of Books

Students read a lot, and some of them even do it for fun. But most stick to classics, specific genre literature, and maybe a handful of world-renowned contemporary authors that traditionally top the lists of global best-sellers.

However, up-to-date literature is so much more than that. In the U.S. alone, it’s represented by some 50,000 published authors, all of them from different walks of life and with unique stories to tell.

Attending events like the LA T Festival of Books is a great opportunity to meet a few emerging authors who are already successful enough to receive a major literary award - but not yet particularly well-known outside a small circle of literary critics and professors.