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October
22, 2001
2001 Kiriyama Book Prize Winners
Announced
Patricia Grace and Peter Hessler to share US $30,000
Award
San Francisco - The 6th annual Kiriyama Pacific
Rim Book Prize, shared by a fiction and a nonfiction winner,
was awarded October 20 to Maori novelist Patricia Grace
for Dogside Story (Auckland: Penguin New Zealand) and American
journalist Peter Hessler for his memoir, River Town: Two
Years on the Yangtze (New York: HarperCollins). The authors
will share the $30,000 award.
The winning authors were announced on Sedge
Thomson's West Coast Live radio program, broadcast from
the 14th annual Vancouver International Writers Festival.
Highlights from the October 20 program were also aired on
the CBC's North by Northwest show in Canada.
Dogside Story, the fifth novel by highly
regarded New Zealand Maori writer Patricia Grace, is a deeply
moving story set in a poor Maori town on a New Zealand coast.
Its protagonist and unexpected hero is a misfit in his local
community. With great warmth, compassion, and humor, Grace
shows how the tenacious community has been divided by the
affects of colonialism and cultural oppression, but also
how its people are bound together by strong traditions.
Dogside speaks not only to the culture of the Maori, but
also to analogous circumstances of indigenous peoples in
many parts of the Pacific Rim. The US edition of Dogside
Story will be published by University of Hawai'i Press before
the end of 2001.
Peter Hessler wrote his winning memoir, River
Town, following a two-year sojourn in Fuling, a small community
in central China, where he taught literature in the Peace
Corps. Hessler's lively narrative allows the authentic voices
of his rural Chinese students to ring through clearly as
he tells about his own adjustment to life in China. With
humor, affection, and keen insight, Hessler provides a vivid
and fresh look at modern China during a time of social and
cultural transition.
"The need for greater intercultural understanding
and tolerance has never been clearer," said Peter J. Coughlan,
president of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Institute (KPRI),
cosponsor of the award with the University of San Francisco
Center for the Pacific Rim.
"I believe that both of the outstanding books
our judges chose this year will further mutual understanding
among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim, which
is the ultimate goal of the Kiriyama Prize," Coughlan added.
In addition to the prize, KPRI also sponsors public programming
and Pacific Rim Voices (www.pacificrimvoices.org), an online
resource for books on the Pacific Rim.
The Kiriyama Book Prize was established in
1996 and was originally awarded annually to only one winning
book. To acknowledge the growing diversity and quantity
of books entered for the prize, both a fiction and a nonfiction
winner have been chosen since 1999.
The 2001 winners were chosen by panels of
fiction and nonfiction judges, who selected five finalists
in each genre on September 22 from among the 301 eligible
entries submitted for the 2001 Prize from publishers worldwide.
The other 2001 fiction finalists were The
Ash Garden by Dennis Bock (Toronto: HarperCollins and New
York: Knopf); Here's to You, Jesusa!, by Elena Poniatowska,
translated by Deanna Heikkinen (New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux); American Son, by Brian Ascalon Roley (New York:
WW Norton); and The Death of Vishnu, by Manil Suri (New
York: WW Norton and London: Bloomsbury).
The other 2001 nonfiction finalists were
Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Ghandi, by Katherine Frank
(London: HarperCollins UK and forthcoming from Houghton
Mifflin, New York); Red Dust: A Path Through China, by Ma
Jian, translated by Flora Drew (UK: Chatto & Windus and
forthcoming from Pantheon, New York); Inside Passage: A
Journey Beyond Borders, by Richard Manning (Washington,
DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books); and Perpetual Happiness:
The Ming Emperor Yongle, by Shih-Shan Henry Tsai (Seattle:
University of Washington Press).
Previous winners of the prize were Michael
Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost and Michael David Kwan's Things
That Must Not Be Forgotten (2000 fiction and nonfiction
Prize, respectively); Andrew X. Pham's Catfish & Mandala
and Cheng Ch'ing-wen's Three-Legged Horse (1999 nonfiction
and fiction, respectively); Ruth L. Ozeki's My Year of Meats
(1998); Patrick Smith's Japan: A Reinterpretation (1997),
and Alan Brown's Audrey Hepburn's Neck (1996).
For information on the Kiriyama Book Prize,
visit www.pacificrimvoices.org or call prize manager Jeannine
Cuevas at (415) 777 1628.
PRESS CONTACT
Elizabeth Whipple
usapress@kiriyamaprize.org
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