BookOpinion

The 27th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were named, kicking off this year’s L.A. Times Book Festival. The award ceremony was hosted by PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer.

“The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes honor the year’s great writers and great literary works,” said Publisher David D. Hiller. “Celebrating the diverse literary universe is a longstanding Book Prizes’ tradition and the 2006 honorees well represent a rich tapestry of writing.”

Fiction:
Winner: "A Woman in Jerusalem" by A.B. Yehoshua translated from Hebrew by Hillel Halkin (Harcourt)
Finalists: “Black Swan Green” by David Mitchell (Random House)
“The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo” by Peter Orner (Little, Brown)
“A Million Nightingales” by Susan Straight (Pantheon Books)
“Winter’s Bone” by Daniel Woodrell (Little, Brown)

Biography:
Winner: "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination" by Neal Gabler (Alfred A. Knopf)
Finalists: “The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher” by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)
“The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s Poet, Casanova’s Friend, and Italian Opera’s Impresario in America” by Rodney Bolt (Bloomsbury USA)
“Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide” by Jeffrey Goldberg (Knopf)
“The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million” by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins)

History:
Winner: "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)
Finalists: “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68″ by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster)
“The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West” by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press)
“Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War” by ; Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking)
“The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai” by John Tayman (Lisa Drew/Scribner)

Other winners included:

Current Interest:
“Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance” by Ian Buruma (Penguin)

Mystery/Thriller:
“Echo Park” by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction:
“White Ghost Girls” by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic)

Young Adult Fiction:
“Tyrell” by Coe Booth (Push/Scholastic)

Science and Technology:
“In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind” by Eric R. Kandel (W.W. Norton)

Poetry:
“Ooga-Booga” by Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)