April 23, 1999
Web posted at: 4:18 p.m. EDT (2018 GMT)

(CNN) -- The 19th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes will be awarded Friday evening at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Royce Hall. The ceremony will kick off the annual L.A. Times Festival of Books, now in its fourth year.

The prizes acknowledge remarkable achievement in eight categories of writing: fiction; first fiction; current interest; history; science and technology; biography; poetry; and young adult fiction. This will be the first year young adult fiction will be honored.

The Festival of Books will be held Saturday and Sunday, April 24 and 25, on the UCLA campus, bringing together those who create books with those who love to read them.

Authors who will participate in the festival include: Deepak Chopra, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Ray Bradbury, Judith Krantz, David Guterson, Michael Palin, Mary Higgins Clark, Sidney Sheldon, Esmeralda Santiago and Charlton Heston.

There will be discussion panels as well as 300 exhibitors selling books and book-related material.

The 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists are:

Fiction
"Evening" by Susan Minot (Alfred A. Knopf)
"Freedomland" by Richard Price (Broadway Books)
"I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)
"The Rings of Saturn" by Winfried Georg Sebald, translated from German by Michael Hulse (New Directions)
"Death in Summer" by William Trevor (Viking)

First Fiction (The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction)
"Hunger: A Novella and Stories" by Lan Samantha Chang (W.W. Norton)
"The Undiscovered Country" by Samantha Gillison (Grove/Atlantic)
"Kalimantaan" by C.S. Godshalk (Henry Holt)
"A Crowded Heart: A Novel" by Nicholas Papandreou (Picador)
"Blue Bossa" by Bart Schneider (Viking)

Current Interest
"Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country" by William Finnegan (Random House)
"Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars" by Cynthia Gorney (Simon & Schuster)
"We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda" by Philip Gourevitch (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
"On the Outside Looking In: A Year in an Inner-City High School" by Cristina Rathbone (Grove/Atlantic)
"American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory" by Russ Rymer (HarperCollins)

History
"Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America" by Ira Berlin (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
"Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry" by Philip D. Morgan (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)
"Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture" by Kathy Peiss (Metropolitan Books)
"The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity" by Roy Porter (W.W. Norton)
"The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life" by Nancy Tomes (Harvard University Press)

Science and Technology
"The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character" by Daniel J. Kevles (W.W. Norton)
"Mendel's Dwarf" by Simon Mawer (Harmony Books)
"Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee (William Morrow)
"Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight" by Pat Shipman (Simon & Schuster)
"Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce" by Douglas Starr (Alfred A. Knopf)

Biography
"Lindbergh" by A. Scott Berg (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
"Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull" by Barbara Goldsmith (Alfred A. Knopf)
"A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751-1816" by Fintan O'Toole (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
"Victor Hugo: A Biography" by Graham Robb (W.W. Norton)
"The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, the Early Years, 1869-1908" by Hilary Spurling (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry
"Without: Poems" by Donald Hall (Houghton Mifflin)
"The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems" by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press)
"The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative" by W.S. Merwin (Alfred A. Knopf)
"Mysteries of Small Houses" by Alice Notley (Penguin)
"American Rush: Selected Poems" by Maureen Owen (Talisman House)

Young Adult Fiction
"Go and Come Back: A Novel" by Joan Abelove (DK Ink)
"Rules of the Road" by Joan Bauer (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
"In a Dark Wood" by Michael Cadnum (Orchard Books)
"Soldier's Heart: Being the Story of the Enlistment and Due Service of the Boy Charley Goddard in the First Minnesota Volunteers" by Gary Paulsen (Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers)
"Holes" by Louis Sachar (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)