Los Angeles Times Book Prizes to be Awarded April 29
Public invited to 20th annual literary awards ceremony at UCLA's Royce Hall

LOS ANGELES, April 14, 2000 - The nine winners of the 20th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes will be announced Saturday, April 29, at a public awards ceremony beginning at 7 p.m. at UCLA's Royce Hall.
Tickets to the event are $10 per person for the ceremony only and $50 per person for both the ceremony and an authors' reception. Tickets may be purchased through the UCLA Box Office at 310/825-2101 or Ticketmaster at 213/365-3500.
A. Scott Berg, author of "Lindbergh," will emcee the event. Berg is a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner.
This year's awards ceremony is being held in conjunction with the fifth annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which will be held Saturday, April 29, and Sunday, April 30, on the UCLA campus. The two-day festival is part of The Times' effort to promote literacy and celebrate the written word.
The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, established in 1980, recognize outstanding literary achievements in eight subject categories: biography, current interest, history, poetry, science and technology, fiction, young adult fiction and first fiction. Each prize includes a $1,000 cash award.
The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction commemorates the contributions of the late Times book editor and Book Prize program founder.
The annual Robert Kirsch Award will also be presented during the ceremony. The award, which is granted by a separate, anonymous judging panel, recognizes a living author who has resided in or whose work focuses on the Western United States. It is named after the late Robert Kirsch - novelist, editor, teacher and one of the nation's foremost book critics - who served as The Times' book critic for more than 25 years prior to his death in 1980.

The 40 Times Book Prize finalists - announced during a February 25 reception at the National Arts Club in New York - were selected by seven three-member committees. (One panel judges both the fiction category and the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.) Most of the members are published authors and serve a two-year term. None of the judges are current Los Angeles Times employees.
Book Prize finalists are:
Biography
· "My Grandfather's House: A Genealogy of Doubt and Faith" by Robert Clark (Picador USA)
· "Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame" by Benita Eisler (Alfred A. Knopf)
· "Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself" by Jerome Loving (University of California Press)
· "Rembrandt's Eyes" by Simon Schama (Alfred A. Knopf)
· "Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette" by Judith Thurman (Alfred A. Knopf)

Current Interest
· "A Border Passage: From Cairo to America - A Woman's Journey" by Leila Ahmed (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
· "Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War" by Mark Bowden (Grove/Atlantic)
· "Sidewalk" by Mitchell Duneier (with photographs by Ovie Carter) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
· "Chosen by God: A Brother's Journey" by Joshua Hammer (Hyperion)
· "An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton" by Richard A. Posner (Harvard University Press)

History
· "Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad" by David Haward Bain (Viking)
· "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II" by John W. Dower (W.W. Norton & Company)
· "The First World War" by John Keegan (Alfred A. Knopf)
· "Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945" by David M. Kennedy (The Oxford History of the United States, Vol. 9) (Oxford University Press)
"The Holocaust in American Life" by Peter Novick (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry
· "The Father of the Predicaments" by Heather McHugh (Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England)
· "The Oval Hour" by Kathleen Peirce (University of Iowa Press)
· "The Dreamhouse" by Tom Sleigh (Phoenix Poets Series) (University of Chicago Press)
· "The Red Leaves of Night" by David St. John (HarperCollins Publishers)
· " Repair: Poems" by C.K. Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Science and Technology (category added in 1989)
· "Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds" by Bernd Heinrich (Cliff Street Books, HarperCollins Publishers)
· "The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS" by Edward Hooper (Little, Brown and Company)
· "Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution" by Alison Jolly (Harvard University Press)
· "The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography" by Simon Singh (Doubleday Books)
· "Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love" by Dava Sobel (Walker and Company)

Fiction
· "Freedom Song: Three Novels" by Amit Chaudhuri (Alfred A. Knopf)
· "House of Sand and Fog" by Andre Dubus, III (W.W. Norton & Company)
· "Plainsong" by Kent Haruf (Alfred A. Knopf)
· "Waiting" by Ha Jin (Pantheon Books)
· "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" by Annie Proulx (Scribner)

Young Adult Fiction (category added in 1998)
· "Skellig" by David Almond (Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers)
· "Speak" by Laurie Halse Anderson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
· "Frenchtown Summer" by Robert Cormier (Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers)
· "Monster" by Walter Dean Myers (HarperCollins Children's Books)
· "Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy" by Sonya Sones (HarperCollins Children's Books)

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (category added in 1991)
· "By the Shore: A Novel" by Galaxy Craze (Grove/Atlantic)
· "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" by Nathan Englander (Alfred A. Knopf)
· "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri (Houghton Mifflin)
· "Last Things" by Jenny Offill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
· "Amy and Isabelle: A Novel" by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)