Times Book Prizes Announced; Malouf Wins for Novel : Honors: Gilmore is biography winner for ‘Shot in the Heart.’ Chauncey takes history award for his work on gay lifestyle in New York.

Authors writing on topics as diverse as Australia, genocide, gay New York, family pathology, diplomacy, evolution and life behind the Iron Curtain won the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, it was announced Thursday at a ceremony for publishers.

The award for fiction was given to David Malouf for “Remembering Babylon,” a novel set in Australia in the 1840s. Malouf examines the reactions of English settlers to a 29-year-old Scottish castaway who had been wandering with the aborigines for 16 years.

The book was hailed by reviewers as a haunting, powerful work noteworthy for its exquisite use of language. Malouf, of Lebanese and British ancestry, has focused on issues of Australian identity during his 35-year literary career.

Mikal Gilmore was selected the biography winner for “Shot in the Heart,” his painful and riveting story of family pathology. The author’s brother, Gary, was executed by a firing squad in Utah for slaying two men.

Mikal Gilmore, a contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, looked at his family as an outsider, chronicling the physical violence and verbal abuse that his father wreaked upon his mother, three older brothers and the author himself. The dark tale was impossible to put down, according to a Los Angeles Times reviewer.

George Chauncey won the history prize for his work “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940.” The book began as Chauncey’s doctoral dissertation at Yale University and explores how gay men created a complex and sophisticated urban subculture complete with codes of manner, dress and speech.

It documents laws and conventions before World War I that affected homosexuals and depicts an era in which gays were the vogue and heterosexuals flocked to gay bars and costume balls. After Prohibition, backlash developed against gay life. Chauncey teaches American history at the University of Chicago.

Winners of the 1994 book prizes, which were announced at a reception for publishers at the Mark Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, receive a $1,000 award. The winning authors will be honored at a ceremony in Los Angeles on Nov. 11.

In the poetry category, Carolyn Forche won for “The Angel of History,” her collection of four long poems which recreate personal and public nightmares of totalitarianism, abandonment, warfare and genocide from the Nazi concentration camps of World War II to “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia.

Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, called her poetry “suddenly important like the morning news” but with a “natural light that makes beauty political by its endurance.”

“The Angel of History” is her fourth collection. Her first, “Gathering the Tribes” won the Yale Younger Poets Award and her second, “The Country Between Us,” won the Lamont Poetry Prize, a major American literary award.

Forche, who has worked for National Public Radio and Amnesty International, lives in Maryland with her husband, who is a photojournalist.

In the category of current interest, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger won for his 900-page analysis “Diplomacy,” tracing the evolution of nations from the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th Century to the present day. A major theme in the book is that in the post-Cold War world, the United States needs to balance the traditional idealism of its foreign policy with a healthy sense of national interest in the diplomatic tradition of European nations.

The Economist, in a review, called Kissinger’s book “a massive, elegant and provocative tome.”

The award in the science and technology category was given to Jonathan Weiner for “The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time.” Weiner describes the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant, biologists who have spent more than two decades weighing, measuring and observing more than 20 generations of finches on a tiny island in the Galapagos.

The book, which reviewers said reads both like an adventure and a detective story, also looks at modern-day evolution among a wide assortment of living creatures. Weiner is a former magazine editor and the author of two earlier books.

For the last four years, The Times has recognized a promising young writer with the Art Seidenbaum Award, in memory of the newspaper’s book editor from 1978 to 1984 who founded the book prizes. The award for a first published work of fiction was given to Martin M. Simecka for “The Year of the Frog.”

Drawing on his own life for the narrative, Simecka tells the story of Milan, a young Slovak who is denied access to a university education because his father is in jail for criticizing the Communist government.

The novel, first published in serial form in an underground journal, explores the sensitive youth’s coming of age against the background of a repressive regime.