The finalists for this year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced this morning, including the finalists for the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction. The Bradbury Prize, which is now in its third year, is sponsored by the Ray Bradbury Foundation; it “honors and extends Bradbury’s literary legacy by celebrating and elevating the writers working in his field today.”
The finalists are:
- Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki (Tor Books)
- Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho (Small Beer Press)
- The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell (Hogarth)
- The World Gives Way by Marissa Levien (Redhook)
- Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon (MCD)
Enriquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is also a finalist in the fiction category, and two other novels in that category come from writers who often work in an SFF-adjacent space: Claire Vaye Watkins’ I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness and Joy Williams’ Harrow.
Also exciting is this year’s Innovator’s Award winner, Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was sentenced to nine year in prison when he was just 16. As the Los Angeles Times writes, he “became a prison reform advocate, legal scholar and poet. The award, which recognizes efforts to bring books, publishing and storytelling into the future, will honor Betts for his work at Freedom Reads, an organization that expands access to literature in prisons and juvenile detention centers.”
The rest of the winners will be announced on April 22.
