Javier Zamora is the winner of the 2022 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose for “Solito: A Memoir.” Sponsored by the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the award encompasses fiction, travel writing, memoir and diary — and honors exceptional work. “Solito” is a necessary memoir for our country and our time. In writing it, Zamora has contributed to the larger canon of uniquely American stories. Chepito is 9-years old when he undertakes a journey across half a continent to find his parents in the United States. Zamora’s enthralling, youthful voice and poetic simplicity belie an unflinching narrative of migration, terror, and beauty.

Freedom to Read Foundation is the 2022 winner of the Innovator’s Award. This award recognizes the people and institutions that are doing cutting edge work to bring books, publishing and storytelling into the future, whether in terms of new business models, new technologies or new applications of narrative art. Created to support and defend librarians, Freedom to Read Foundation is as important and relevant today as it was at its inception in 1969. We honor its continued fight against book bans and its mission to protect all Americans' right to read and access information.

James Ellroy is the 43rd winner of the Times’ annual Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. The award is given to an author with a substantial connection to the American West whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition. Ellroy is a Los Angeles noir iconoclast whose writing life was shaped by the tragic, unsolved murder of his mother when he was 10, fostering an obsession with crime and the underworld that has animated his fiction and nonfiction across more than 5 decades.