Winners of Times Book Prizes Named

The newest Los Angeles Times Book Prize winners take readers through a rich web of space, love and time.

Take, for instance, Judith Thurman’s sizzling biography of French author Colette, whose treatment of sex a century ago still draws a blush. Or the humanizing portrait by Dava Sobel of Galileo through the eyes of his oldest daughter, a nun.

Times Book Review Editor Steve Wasserman called the two books “definitive.”

They are “not only instructive, but vastly entertaining,” he said. “Sentence by sentence, [readers know] they are in the hands of marvelous storytellers.”

The winners were announced Saturday night at a public ceremony at UCLA’s Royce Hall, marking the 20th year the paper has acknowledged remarkable achievement in writing in eight categories ranging from science and technology to fiction for young adults.

Also lauded at the event was Ursula K. Le Guin, whose novels have taken readers to distant and fantastic worlds for more than 30 years.

Le Guin, of Portland, Ore., received the Robert Kirsch Award, recognizing her as a highly acclaimed author living in the American West. The award is named for the Times literary critic who died in 1980.

She is an “anthropologist of the post-nuclear world,” said the critic’s son, Jonathan Kirsch, who presented the award. The multiple winner of Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction introduces readers to “whole new races and places of her own device, filling them with people who pulse with plausible life, fleshing out her self-invented worlds with languages and cultures, politics and folkways, dreams and terrors of their own.”

The eight book prize recipients were among 40 finalists reviewed by anonymous panels of judges, many of whom are published writers but do not work for this paper.

Thurman captured the prize for biography with “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” about the author who lived to 80 and produced almost as many works, inspired by those living on the sexual edge. Thurman “brings a fresh illumination to Colette’s life without veiling her flaws,” the judges wrote.

Similarly illuminating is Sobel’s “Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love,” the judges concluded. Sobel captured the prize for science and technology. The judges praised her “masterpiece of counterpoint,” which highlights the 16th century astronomer’s struggle to understand the first telescopic observations amid Europe’s poverty and plague.

Other book prize winners were:

* Mitchell Duneier, in current interest, for “Sidewalk” (with photographs by Ovie Carter). The sociologist, who spent several years among Greenwich Village’s street vendors and homeless, “shows how the people who live on the periphery of our lives may actually improve the life of a great city,” the judges wrote.

* Amit Chaudhuri, in fiction, for “Freedom Song: Three Novels.” “His Bombay aunts and uncles and cousins are as big and recognizable to Western readers as any fictional protagonists in Faulkner or Twain--without losing their idiomatic precision or their Indianness,” the judges concluded.

* John W. Dower, in history, for “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.” “The narrative is original in its treatment of the emperor . . . and in giving voice to a wide range of the Japanese population,” the judges wrote.

* C.K. Williams, in poetry, for “Repair: Poems.” The poet “intends nothing less than a change in how the reader perceives the world,” the judges said.

* Robert Cormier, in young adult fiction, for “Frenchtown Summer.” “Like a fine wine, ‘Frenchtown Summer’ distills all the themes and images of Cormier’s previous novels in one intensely beautiful and masterfully restrained work,” the judges wrote.

* Elizabeth Strout, recipient of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction for “Amy and Isabelle: A Novel.” She “not only offers her readers exquisitely observed details of small-town lives, but also exhibits ample generosity toward the poignantly stubborn frailties of her characters,” the judges wrote.

Each winning author received a citation and cash prize of $1,000.