Books about artists, killers and war figured prominently in the 25th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes awarded Friday night at UCLA's Royce Hall, the curtain-raiser on this weekend's Festival of Books on the Westwood campus.
The Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement was presented to Tony Hillerman, whose novels of the American Southwest "reinvented the mystery novel as a venue for the exploration and celebration of Native American history, culture and identity," according to the citation.
Some of the winners, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning "De Kooning: An American Master," by journalists Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, have already scored literary honors. But for others, such as Lorraine Adams' debut novel "Harbor," the $1,000 prize marked the first formal recognition.
Awards in nine categories for books in 2004 were handed out in a ceremony moderated by journalist Harold Evans, an author and former president of Random House.
Evans set the tone for the evening by decrying what he called the "tyranny of numbers" in which success is measured by sales. "One number every year has to be exceeded every year by another," he said.
Evans cited books from the past that have led to technological and social advances once their ideas were seized upon by others.
"Tonight we should celebrate not only the brilliant finalists ... or the worthy winners," he said. "We're celebrating the vessel that brings imagination and thought to us. Indeed, the precious vessel that carries and preserves and enhances our civilization for generations: the book."
The Willem de Kooning biography by Stevens and Swan, a husband-and-wife team, was cited for "rich brushstrokes of prose, lushly layered detail and kinetic pacing." The couple live in New York City, where Stevens is an art critic for New York magazine and Swan is a freelance editor and writer.
Adams, who won a 1992 Pulitzer for investigative reporting, published her first novel by re-imagining events growing from a foiled plan by terrorists for a millennium attack on Los Angeles International Airport. The judges gave her the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction for a novel that "carries the reader into a hidden world of misunderstanding and confusion, a world that has been hinted at in the front pages, but never truly revealed -- as it is here -- with all its bad timing and bad luck, and its profound humanity."
