L.A. Times Book Prize honorees toast to writings political power: When people rise, empires always fall
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Some of our finest contemporary writers got their laurels Friday night at the 46th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony at USC’s Bovard Auditorium.At the awards ceremony, which opens the annual L.A.Times Festival of Books weekend, Oakland-born writer Amy Tan and literary nonprofit We Need Diverse Books received achievement honors, and finalists in 13 other categories became prize winners.
The presenters and awardees who took the stage balanced a spirit of playfulness — Times senior editor Sophia Kercher called the weekend’s festival “my personal Coachella” and Times columnist LZ Granderson saluted his fellow “booktroverts” — and one of reverence as they celebrated writing as an instrument for advocacy, imagination and history-keeping.Entertainment & Arts Here’s everything you need to know about tickets, parking and speakers ahead of the L.A.
Times Festival of Books this weekend.As Bench Ansfield virtually accepted his award in the history category for “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City,” which exposes a pattern of landlords setting residential fires to collect insurance payouts, he said, “It’s a scary time to be a historian in the United States.”“Our field, like so many other fields, is under attack,” Ansfield said.“To understand the crises in front of us, we have to understand our history.”Among the crises highlighted was AI encroachment, the subject of science and technology category winner Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.” The AI expert and investigative journalist’s book is a critical investigation into the rise of OpenAI and its impact on society.
In Hao’s acceptance speech, read by presenter Jia-Rui Cook in her absence, the author said she “can’t help but be disturbed by how the themes of this book have grown more relevant by the d...