Ferlinghetti Leads List of Times Book Prize Award-Winners

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco’s first poet laureate and an enduring literary icon of the Beat Generation, received the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award on Saturday night for a body of work that spans five decades.

Ferlinghetti, founder and co-owner of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, was honored during the 21st annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize awards ceremonies at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

Times Book Editor Steve Wasserman described Ferlinghetti as “an exemplary bookseller, poet, publisher, bohemian and indefatigable mischief-maker who has sought assiduously to defy convention while bringing pleasure and joy to readers everywhere.”

The prizes were awarded in nine categories--including a new mystery/thriller grouping.

Val McDermid won the prize in the program’s newest category for her mystery “A Place of Execution: A Novel.” Judges said the novel, about a teenage girl’s disappearance from her isolated village, “offers vibrant evidence that the traditional mystery, in right hands, is well able to hold its own in the 21st century.”

Wasserman said the added category was long overdue, especially in Los Angeles, “the city that is, in the popular imagination, defined by Raymond Chandler” and others of the genre.

Book prizes in the eight other categories went to the following:

* Alice Kaplan, in history, for “The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach.” Judges said Kaplan “writes with a rare beauty and striking control over her material. . . . This is history as it should be written.”

* Gjertrud Schnackenberg, in poetry, for “The Throne of Labdacus.” Judges called the book-length poem, a retelling of the narrative of Oedipus, “beautifully written and crafted, deeply felt.”

* Dr. James Le Fanu, in science and technology, for “The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine.” The book “sets forth clearly the scope and limits of modern medicine as a scientific, personal and social enterprise bound by human limits,” judges wrote.

* Pankaj Mishra, recipient of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, named in honor of the late former Times book editor, for “The Romantics: A Novel.” Judges called Mishra’s writing “vivid and authoritative.”

* Frances FitzGerald, in current interest, for “Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War.” Judges said the book offers a “ruthlessly fair-minded exploration of why otherwise bright people continue to be wedded to notions of nuclear-war fighting . . . they surely must know to be absurd.”

* Jacqueline Woodson, in young adult fiction, for “Miracle’s Boys,” which judges found “at once unsparing and tender.”

* William J. Cooper Jr., in biography, for “Jefferson Davis, American.” Judges wrote, “With Uncommon elegance, grace and command, [Cooper] has chronicled the life and times of one of America’s most complex historical figures.”

* David Means, in fiction, for “Assorted Fire Events: Stories.” Judges found the 13 stories “introduce something new under the sun, a wide-ranging intelligence writing the consciousness of characters with a lot on their minds.”

Judges in each category decide on the Times Book Prizes. Most are published writers, and none are current Times employees. Each prize brings a citation and $1,000.

The Kirsch Award, named in honor of the late Robert Kirsch, who was the Times’ literary critic for many years, is given annually to recognize the body of work of a writer living in or writing about the American West.

Wasserman said the book prizes are a way of “celebrating the written word in all its forms . . . an extension of what we do every day in the newspaper.”