Jennine Capó Crucet, Kelly Link, and Danielle Trussoni are among the winners of this year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, given annually by the newspaper to “celebrate the highest quality of writing from authors at all stages of their careers.”
The winners were announced at a ceremony Friday evening at the University of Southern California.
Capó Crucet won the fiction award for Say Hello to My Little Friend, which follows a Pitbull impersonator in Miami who decides to model his life on Tony Montana, the protagonist of the 1983 movie Scarface. The novel was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, with a critic for the magazine praising it as “unclassifiable and unforgettable.”
Link took home the science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction prize for her novel The Book of Love, while Trussoni won the mystery/thriller award for The Puzzle Box.
The current interest prize went to Jesse Katz for The Rent Collectors. Andrea Freeman won the history award for Ruin Their Crops on the Ground, and Laura Beers took home the biography prize for Orwell’s Ghosts.
Kim Johnson was the winner of the young adult literature prize for The Color of a Lie, while the graphic novel/comics award went to Taiyō Matsumoto for Tokyo These Days, Vol. 1.
The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were first awarded in 1980. Previous winners include Louise Erdrich for Love Medicine, Frank McCourt for Angela’s Ashes, and Jason Reynolds for Long Way Down. A full list of this year’s winners is available at the Times website.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
