Los Angeles Times Book Prize: current interest

The Los Angeles Times has honored books annually since 1980. Currently, it does so in many categories that include, among others, biography, current interest, fiction, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, and young adult fiction. Works are eligible regardless of the language in which they were originally published, but not until the year of their first U.S. publication in English.  The prizes are normally presented before the start of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, another annual event sponsored by the newspaper.

2023: We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, by Roxanna Asgarian

2022: Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America, by Dahlia Lithwick

2021: Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could, by Adam Schiff

2020: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson

2019: Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, by Emily Bazelon

2018: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, by Francisco Cantú

2017: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean

2016: Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich

2015: Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes

2014: The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, by Jeff Hobbs

2013: Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink

2012: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo

2011: Thnking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

2010: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis

2009: Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

2008: Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by Barton Gellman

2007: Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, by Elizabeth D. Samet

2006: Murder in Amsterdam: the Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, by Ian Buruma

2005: Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War, by Anthony Shadid

2004: Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War, by Evan Wright

2003: The New Chinese Empire - And What It Means for the United States, by Ross Terrill

2002: Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, by Judith Levine

2001: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich

2000: Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, by Frances FitzGerald

1999: Sidewalk, by Mitchell Duneier

1998: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, by Philip Gourevitch

1997: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman

1996: Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, by Peter Maass

1995: Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black, by Gregory Howard Williams

1994: Diplomacy, by Henry Kissinger

1993: Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority, by Peter Skerry

1992: The End of History and the Last Man, by Francis Fukuyama

1991: Why Americans Hate Politics: The Death of the Democratic Process, by E.J. Dionne

1990: Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century, by O.B. Hardison, Jr.

1989: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963, by Taylor Branch

1988: Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, by William Greider

1987: The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins

1986: Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, by Joseph Lelyveld

1985: Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton

1984: Cities and the Wealth of Nations, by Jane Jacobs

1983: Lost in the Cosmos, by Walker Percy

1982: The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell

1981: Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, by Jaocbo Timerman

1980: Without Fear or Favor, by Harrison Salisbury (winner of the general award - there was no current interest award in 1980)