The winners of the 42nd annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced.

The awards are ‘dedicated to discovering new voices and celebrating the highest quality of writing across the spectrum of book publishing’, and were announced at a ceremony at the University of Southern California.

Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo was awarded the LA Times Fiction Award, for her novel In the Company of Men.

The book was inspired by real accounts of the Ebola epidemic that devastated West Africa. Judges called it ‘unlike anything we’ve ever read … gripping and prescient’.

• Read: ‘The village is cursed. Don’t ever come back here.’—an excerpt from Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men

Other winners included Luis J Rodriguez, who was honoured with the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, who received the Innovator’s Award for his work advocating for literacy in prisons.

2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes

• Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Jackie Polzin, Brood: A Novel (Doubleday)
• Biography: Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (Holt)
• Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose: Deborah Levy, Real Estate: A Living Autobiography (Bloomsbury)
• Current Interest: Adam Schiff, Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could (Random House)
• Fiction: Véronique Tadjo, In the Company of Men (Other Press)
• Graphic Novel/Comics: R Kikuo Johnson, No One Else (Fantagraphics)
• History: Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History (Scribner)
• Mystery/Thriller: Megan Abbott, The Turnout: A Novel (Putnam)
• Poetry: Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets (Graywolf)
• Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction: Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad: Stories (Small Beer Press)
• Science & Technology: Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (Bold Type)
• Young Adult Literature: Rita Williams-Garcia, A Sitting in St James (Quill Tree)

Categories Africa Fiction International

Tags Awards In the Company of Men Jacana Media Los Angeles Times Book Prizes News Véronique Tadjo