September 25, 2001

Patricia Grace Named Kiriyama Prize Fiction Finalist
Winners of US$30,000 Prize to be named October 20 in Vancouver

San Francisco - Author Patricia Grace's widely praised fifth novel, Dogside Story (Penguin New Zealand), has been named one of the 5 fiction finalists for the 6th annual Kiriyama Prize, a US $30,000 award to be shared by a nonfiction and a fiction winner. Five nonfiction finalists were also chosen. (The complete list of finalists follows.)

The two Prize-winning authors will be announced on a live radio program Saturday, October 20, 10 AM to 12 noon PST, from the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival in Canada.

The Kiriyama Prize was established in 1996 as an annual award for a single book that would encourage greater understanding among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim. To acknowledge the diversity and quantity of books entered for the prize, both a fiction winner and a nonfiction winner have been awarded since 1999.

A total of 301 eligible books were entered for the Kiriyama Prize this year from publishers around the world, including 7 from publishers in New Zealand Aotearoa. In accordance with Prize rules, the books entered cover a broad range of Pacific bordering countries and also South Asia, which has been included in the prize's parameters since last year.

Australian author Nicholas Jose, who served as a fiction judge for the 2001 Prize, said, "This year's shortlist offers real literary excitement from a group of very different writers across an extraordinary range of subject matter. It was hard...to narrow it down to a final five. The result only highlights the energy of writing from different perspectives around the Pacific and Asia - some of the best in the world."

Publisher Bob Ross of Tandem Press in Auckland serves on the Advisory Council for the Kiriyama Prize.

The Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize is cosponsored by the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Institute and the University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim. For information about the prize, visit www.pacificrimvoices.org or call (415) 777 1628. For information about the Vancouver Festival only call 604/681-6330.

The fiction finalists:

• The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada). A sensitively told, powerful anti-war novel paralleling the permanently scarred lives of Emiko Amai, a Japanese-American filmmaker, whose entire family was killed in the bombing of Hiroshima, and of Anton Bİll, a morally torn and emotionally crippled scientist, who worked on the development of the bomb at Los Alamos.
• Dogside Story, by Patricia Grace (Auckland: Penguin Books New Zealand). Set in rural New Zealand at the approach of the new millennium, Grace's authentic characters reveal not only the long-term divisive effects of colonial land division and cultural oppression on the Maori people but also the strength of the traditions that still tie them together. Renowned and beloved in New Zealand, but not as well known elsewhere, this is Maori author Grace's fifth novel.
• Here's to You, Jesusa!, by Elena Poniatowska, translated by Deanna Heikkinen (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Originally published in 1969 but available only now in English translation, this passionate novel by Mexican author and journalist Poniatowska portrays the life story of Jesusa, a poor but resourceful and independent woman in Oaxaca in the late 1800s. A picaresque tale of survival and a critical look at the Mexican Revolution, and state and church corruption.
• American Son, by Brian Ascalon Roley (New York: WW Norton). A gritty but accomplished first novel about two Filipino-American brothers growing up in contemporary California and their respective struggles to accept their heritage. Tomas models himself on a Mexican gangster and opts for theft and violence, Gabe tries to flee his brother's brutal ways but can't get far from his family.
• The Death of Vishnu, by Manil Suri (New York: WW Norton). This debut novel chronicles a community of quarrelsome families living in a multi-level, segregated apartment building-a metaphor for modern India, where the story is placed. Vishnu, an old, ailing, and destitute man, who lives on the landing, is witness to the apartment dwellers' daily lives. With humor and compassion Suri renders Vishnu's death scene as both Hindu mythology and as a Bollywood movie.

The nonfiction finalists:

• Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Ghandi, by Katherine Frank (London: HarperCollins UK). Frank's well-wrought biography of India's only woman prime minister portrays Indira Ghandi as a strong-willed, ruthless, and tragic figure. The only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, Indira set out to uphold his inclusive vision for her homeland. Frank shows how instead Indira became a reviled despot, and left India a damaged country.
• River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler (New York: HarperCollins). A poignant, sometimes hilarious memoir from a Peace Corps volunteer who spent 1996-68 teaching English literature in Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze River. While allowing the voices of the rural Chinese themselves to resonate through his own narrative, Hessler's own keen observations provide a fresh perspective on a tumultuous period in Chinese culture and politics.
• Red Dust, by Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew (London: Chatto & Windus). In what one of the Kiriyama Prize judges dubbed, "A Chinese On the Road," poet and artist Ma Jian tells the story of his difficult trek through the Chinese hinterland as a young man, from 1983-86. In joining the author on his arduous journey, undertaken to escape from political and domestic pressures, we glimpse a side of China seldom seen or written about.
• Inside Passage: A Journey Beyond Borders, by Richard Manning (Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books). There are two underlying messages in this engaging and unconventional travelogue by award-winning journalist Manning. The first is a challenge to stop runaway development in the Pacific Northwest United States. The second is a call for rethinking the established ways of protecting natural resources.
• Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle, by Shih-Shan Henry Tsai (Seattle: University of Washington Press, distributed in Canada by UBC Press). A colorful historical biography of one of the most revered emperors of China and a vivid portrait of life during the Ming dynasty. Scholar Tsai's lively writing will infect even non-scholarly audiences with his own evident enthusiasm for his subject.

PRESS CONTACT
Jeannine Cuevas
415/777 1628

jeannine@pacificrimvoices.org