Pacific Rim Voices announced yesterday the winners of the twelfth annual Kiriyama Prize. New Zealand author Lloyd Jones won in fiction for his novel Mister Pip (Knopf Canada). Julia Whitty, who was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and lives in California, won in nonfiction for her book The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific (Houghton Mifflin). Each received fifteen thousand dollars.
The finalists in fiction were David Malouf for The Complete Stories (Pantheon), Nicole Mones for The Last Chinese Chef (Houghton Mifflin), Roma Tearne for Mosquito (HarperCollins Canada), and Zhu Wen for I Love Dollars (Columbia University Press), translated by Julia Lovell.
The finalists in nonfiction were Tom Bissell for The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (Pantheon), Liza Dalby for East Wind Melts the Ice (University of California Press), Ramachandra Guha for India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy (Ecco/HarperCollins), and Susan Mann for The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (University of California Press).
The judges in fiction were Alan Cheuse, Pam Chun, Abby Pollak, Judy Stoffman, and Madeleine Thien; the nonfiction judges were Bridget Boylan, Janet Brown, Sally Ito, Alma Lee, and Joanne Sandstrom.
Pacific Rim Voices also released a list of Kiriyama Prize notable titles. The books of fiction are My South Seas Sleeping Beauty (Columbia University Press) by Guixing Zhang, translated by Valerie Jaffee; Bird of Another Heaven (Knopf) by James D. Houston; Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Denis Johnson; The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury) by David Leavitt; God of Luck (Soho Press) by Ruthanne Lum McCunn; The Ocean in the Closet (Coffee House Press) by Yuko Tanigushi; The Elephanta Suite (Houghton Mifflin) by Paul Theroux; and The Assassin's Song (Doubleday Canada) by M. G. Vassanji.
Pacific Rim Voices, a nonprofit organization supporting literature that contributes to a greater understanding of the Pacific Rim and Southeast Asia, established the Kiriyama Prize in 1996. The award is given to authors worldwide to honor books of fiction and nonfiction written in or translated to English that relate to the regions, cultures, and people of Pacific Rim nations.
