Novels Lila’s Story and Lila’s Dance Win Literary Titan Awards

David Ghilardi's debut Lila's Dance, A Tale of Two Journeys and Chris Flanders's Lila's Story: War, Alaska, and the Open Sea both received Literary Titan Book Awards on October 10, 2026. Ghilardi's late-seventeenth-century novel follows Carthusian monk Sebastian at the Grand Chartreuse, who discovers a secret letter attributed to St. Bruno, conflicts with Church doctrine, and is sent to St. Kitts, where he encounters Lila; their paths cross the Dutch low country, French Alps, India, Paris, and the Caribbean. Literary Titan called it an ambitious meditation on spiritual freedom. Ghilardi, a retired Madison attorney and Knox College creative writing graduate with more than forty years of daily meditation, drew on Into Great Silence and a Nevis account of a priest who eloped with a Huguenot governor's daughter. Flanders's book is inspired by Lila Michaels, middle child of seven on a North Dakota farm, who moved to Chicago in 1935, worked at Cook County Hospital, joined the first WAAC training class, served in North Africa and Italy, then worked with the Corps of Engineers in Alaska, traveled by freighter, and experienced the 1964 earthquake. Literary Titan said Lila's competence is the heart of the book. Flanders is a retired nurse practitioner in Western New York who wrote a Bemus Point-Stow Ferry history and donated proceeds for 2020 hull repairs. Contested: nothing contested in the record.