The L.A. Times Festival Crowns Bryan Washington and Honours Amy Tan: A Night for Good Books
There are prizes that remind you why it's worth reading in the first place. The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, handed out Friday night at USC's Bovard Auditorium — opening night of the Festival of Books, that weekend when the city of cinema becomes the city of books — were exactly that.
The fiction prize went to Bryan Washington for Palaver, his second novel. Washington had already reached the National Book Award shortlist with this same book, so the L.A. Times prize isn't a revelation but a confirmation: this writer has a voice that stays. A Texan in his thirties, Washington has spent years building his own literary world from the lives of people who rarely appear on book covers — immigrant families, Houston neighbourhoods, queer bodies loving each other awkwardly and furiously. Palaver is conversation, in the deepest sense of the word: the kind of talk that transforms everyone who takes part in it.
What left me speechless, though, was the other announcement: Amy Tan received the Robert Kirsch Award, the festival's lifetime achievement honour. Tan published The Joy Luck Club in 1989 and has since become one of those writers who live in a reader's memory almost involuntarily. She writes about Chinese-American mothers and daughters, about the silences that accumulate between generations, about the stories we inherit and the stories we choose. That Los Angeles — her city — should formally recognise her feels like a long overdue embrace.
The full prize list was generous and varied: Karen Hao won science and technology for Empire of AI; Bench Ansfield took history with Born in Flames, about arson and urban speculation; Megan Abbott won mystery with El Dorado Drive; Allison Benis White took poetry with A Magnificent Loneliness; Justin Haynes's debut Ibis won the Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction. Also winning were Trung Le Nguyen (young adult), Ekow Eshun (biography), Brian Goldstone (current interest), Silvia Park (speculative fiction), and We Need Diverse Books (Innovator's Award).
What strikes me about this list is its refusal to be uniform: urgent nonfiction alongside introspective poetry, mystery novel alongside literary debut. Since 1980, the L.A. Times Book Prizes have insisted that there is no single way to make literature in English. Friday was another reminder. Look for Bryan Washington's Palaver. And if you haven't read Amy Tan yet, let this be the week you start.