Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the top fiction prize Friday for his novel, "Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores," and Hilary Spurling received the biography award for her second volume on the life of artist Henri Matisse at the 26th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, in a ceremony at UCLA.
Presentation of the Robert Kirsch Award to Joan Didion for her anguished memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking," was announced last month.
The award is given annually to a living author "with a substantial connection to the American West" whose contributions to American letters deserve special recognition. Kirsch was the newspaper's book critic for 25 years.
The winners in nine categories were unveiled at Royce Hall, as a kickoff to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which will continue through Sunday at UCLA.
In his novel, Marquez, a giant of 20th century fiction, tells the story of a mediocre Colombian journalist and his continuing fascination with a young factory girl; the book, published by Alfred A. Knopf, was translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.
Other nominees included "The March" by E. L. Doctorow (Random House); "Veronica" by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon Books); "A Long Way Down" by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books); and "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Knopf).
Spurling's biography, "Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954," was published by Knopf.
Other nominees included "Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster); "Mencken: the American Iconoclast" by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (Oxford University Press); "Melville: His World and Work" by Andrew Delbanco (Knopf); and "The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century" by Steven Watts (Knopf).
The award in the current interest category went to "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War" by Anthony Shadid, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the Washington Post (Henry Holt). Other nominees included "Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse" by Steve Bogira (Knopf); "Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story" by Kurt Eichenwald (Broadway Books); "The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece" by Jonathan Harr (Random House); and "Still Looking: Essays on American Art" by John Updike (Knopf).
