2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Announced

Posted on April 23, 2012

The winners of the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced Friday, April 20, 2012, during a public ceremony held in the Bovard Auditorium on the campus of USC. The L.A. Times Book Fair was held on the USC campus near downtown Los Angeles for the first time -- the festival was previously held at UCLA. The winners are:

Biography: Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell (Doubleday)
Current Interest: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Fiction: Luminarium by Alex Shakar (SoHo Press)
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Shards by Ismet Prcic (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic)
Graphic Novel: Finder: Voice by Carla Speed McNeil (Dark Horse)
History: Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White (W.W. Norton & Company)
Mystery / Thriller: 11/22/1963 by Stephen King (Scribner)
Poetry: Double Shadow: Poems by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (no excerpt available online)
Science & Technology: Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius by Sylvia Nasar (Simon & Schuster)
Young Adult Literature: The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman (Scholastic Press)
2011 Robert Kirsch Award Winner: Rudolfo Anaya
Innovator's Award: Figment, a digital writing community co-founded by Jacob Lewis and Dana Goodyear