LA Times Book Prize Winners Announced

The LA Times has announced their book prize winners.

2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winners

Biography
Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (Amistad/HarperCollins)

Current Interest
Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency
(The Penguin Press)

Fiction
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Zoë Ferraris, Finding Nouf (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

History
Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
(The Penguin Press)

Mystery/Thriller
Michael Koryta, Envy the Night (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Minotaur)

Poetry
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Science and Technology
Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (Little, Brown and Co.)

Young Adult Literature
Terry Pratchett, Nation (HarperCollins)

2008 Robert Kirsch Award Winner

Robert Alter

Robert Alter is Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.
He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University.
He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His 22 published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into eight different languages. Among his publications over the past 15 years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), Genesis: Translation and Commentary (1996), The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (1999), Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (2000), and The Five Book of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (2004), Imagined Cities (2005), and The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (2007).

for a complete list of 2008
Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists.

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