2006 KIRIYAMA PRIZE FINALISTS ANNOUNCED
Works spanning the Pacific Rim and South Asia from Burma to Mexico
featured on this year's shortlists

SAN FRANCISCO (February 28, 2006) - Pacific Rim Voices announces today the 10 finalists for the 10th annual Kiriyama Prize. Two winners, one for fiction and one for non-fiction, will be named on March 28, 2006. The winners will share equally the U.S. $30,000 cash award.

Judges for this year's fiction category, among them noted author Maxine Hong Kingston, have chosen an intriguing shortlist for this year's Prize, which includes three novels and two collections of short stories. Canadian author Karen Connelly's novel The Lizard Cage, sets free the reader's imagination, if not the characters in her book: it is set entirely in a Burmese prison cell. Noted Calcutta-born author Amitav Ghosh sets his novel The Hungry Tide in quite a different place — the Sundarbans (literally "beautiful lands") — islands off the coast of India. Hungry Tide is Ghosh's fifth novel.  Luis Alberto Urrea is the first author ever to be chosen as a Kiriyama Prize finalist for both nonfiction (in 2005) and for fiction (in 2006). His novel, The Hummingbird's Daughter, is a fictionalized biography of Urrea's own great-aunt set during Mexico's Civil War. Urrea's previous book, The Devil's Highway, was short-listed for not only the Kiriyama Prize, but also for the Pulitzer in 2005. The two short-story collections on the shortlist are by writers, Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) and Jess Row (The Train to Lo Wu). Li, like National Book Award winner Ha Jin, was born and raised in China, coming to the U.S. only about a decade ago. Since then, her stories have been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Row taught English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and draws on his experiences there in his writing, which has, among other honors, appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2001 and 2003.

In the nonfiction category, the finalists include: Isami's House by Gail Lee Bernstein, a captivating portrait of fourteen generations of a Japanese family; Crossing Three Wildernesses, poet U Sam Oeur's heart-wrenching memoir of his life in Cambodia before, during and after the Khmer Rouge; A Man With No Talents by Oyama Shiro (translated by Edward Fowler), memoir of a man who voluntarily dropped out of mainstream Japanese society to live on the streets of Tokyo; The Golden Spruce by author John Vaillant, a page-turning account of the mysterious disappearance of a former timber scout following the felling of a 300 year old tree that was sacred to the indigenous Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands; and The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky, which chronicles the author's fascinating experiences among the nomadic Eveny people of Siberia, whose "partnership" with reindeer has shaped their way of life through generations.

"All of the books our judges have chosen for this year's shortlist are highly engaging, and each offer unique perspectives on different parts of the Pacific Rim and South Asia. There is something of interest here for virtually any reader, including some great choices for book groups," said Jeannine Stronach, Prize Manager.

Past finalists and winners of the Kiriyama Prize include Sherman Alexie, Nadeem Aslam, Monica Ali, Peter Carey, Cheng Ch'ing-wen, Inga Clendinnen, Carlos Fuentes, Patricia Grace, Shirley Hazzard, Ha Jin, Suketu Mehta, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje, Ruth Ozeki, Andrew X. Pham, Elena Poniatowska, Shan Sa, Kerri Sakamoto, Pascal Khoo Thwe, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Simon Winchester, and Tim Winton.

The Kiriyama Prize is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and of South Asia. Authors from anywhere in the world are eligible.  Eligible books will be written in English or translated into English from any other language, and must be published in North America.

Pacific Rim Voices (PRV), sponsor of the Kiriyama Prize, continues to develop a family of projects celebrating literature from and about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. It sponsors WaterBridgeReview.org, a website featuring reviews of many of the books that are entered for the Prize together with author interviews and other resources.  Recognizing the importance of instilling in young people an appreciation and respect for other cultures, the organization sponsors PaperTigers.org, a website offering a lively, colorful presentation of books for young readers.

A fuller description of the short-listed books including publisher information follows the body of this release.

For more information about the Kiriyama Prize and the 2006 finalists, visit www.kiriyamaprize.org, or contact Jeannine Stronach, Prize Manager, at 415/777-1628 or via email admin@kiriyamaprize.org.

THE 2006 KIRIYAMA PRIZE FINALISTS

The five fiction finalists (of 79 eligible entries) are:

The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly (Random House Canada — and forthcoming from Nan Talese/Doubleday in the U.S.)

Connelly’s imaginative debut novel addresses the brutal treatment of political prisoners in Burma through the voice of Teza, a musician serving the seventh year of a twenty-year prison sentence for singing powerful protest songs.  Connelly is both an award-winning poet and non-fiction writer.  Her first book of prose, Touch the Dragon, an account of the year she spent in Thailand at seventeen, won the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction in 1993; at twenty-four, she was the youngest writer ever to win that prize.

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh (Houghton Mifflin)

Amitav Ghosh's fifth novel is a compelling tale of two outsiders who venture into the archipelago of small islands known as the Sundarbans off the coast of India.  Ghosh was born in Calcutta and raised and educated in South Asia, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom.  His previous novel, The Glass Palace, was an international bestseller, which sold more than a half-million copies in Britain.  The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve countries and is also an international bestseller.  Ghosh has won France's Prix Medici Etranger and many other awards for his work.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li (Random House USA)

Author Yiyun Li makes every word count in this beautifully written collection of ten unique short stories, each of which explore the human impact of the Cultural Revolution and life under Mao.  Li's own story is as complex and interesting as the characters in her stories: she came to America from her native Beijing in 1996 to study medicine, but began writing two years later and went on to receive an MFA from Iowa Writers' Workshop.  She now lives in Oakland, California.

The Train to Lo Wu by Jess Row (The Dial Press) 

Debut author Jess Row drew on his own experience teaching English in Hong Kong to craft this excellent collection of seven short stories.  The interaction among Row's protagonists, made up of mainland Chinese, Hong Kong locals, and foreign residents, delves into how politics, cultural differences, and individual personalities all play a role in relationships in the cosmopolitan city.  Row's stories have been included in the Best American Short Stories 2001 and 2003 anthologies and many other publications.

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little Brown)

Urrea based this richly textured novel on the story of his own great-aunt Teresita, who was an enigmatic spiritual healer known as "The Saint of Cabora" in Mexico around the turn of the last century.  Hummingbird's Daughter truly brings alive that place and time.  Urrea's previous book, The Devil's Highway was also chosen as a Kiriyama Prize finalist, but in the nonfiction category.  He is the first author to earn this distinction.  That book was also shortlisted for the Pulitzer and won Urrea the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Nonfiction.

The five nonfiction finalists (of 100 eligible entries) are:

Isami's House by Gail Lee Bernstein (University of California Press)

In Isami's House, scholar Gail Lee Bernstein creates an intimate portrait of 14 generations of a prominent Japanese family and illuminates the past three centuries of Japanese history in the process.  The author's engaging writing style and her forty-year friendship with members of the family at the center of her book lend a unique authenticity to her portrayal of their history that surpasses more academic works and make Isami's House worthy of a wide audience.  The author of several other works of nonfiction about Japan, Bernstein is Professor of History at the University of Arizona.

Crossing Three Wildernesses by U Sam Oeur (Coffee House Press)

In Crossing Three Wildernesses celebrated poet U Sam Oeur chronicles his life in Cambodia during three periods: before, during and after the infamous Khmer Rouge took power there.  Oeur describes his near-idyllic country boyhood on a farm before Cambodia's national nightmare began; his years as a government official; then the devastating takeover of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge; and finally the "liberation" of Cambodia by the Vietnamese.  U Sam Oeur is the author of the acclaimed bilingual collection of poems Sacred Vows.  He now lives in Texas where he translates the poems of Walt Whitman into Khmer.

A Man with No Talents by Oyama Shiro translated by Edward Fowler (Cornell University Press)

Author Oyama Shiro is a self-proclaimed misfit.  He quit his job as a corporate salaryman in Tokyo to live as a day laborer in a notorious slum called San'ya.  A Man with No Talents is his fascinating memoir, which offers a true insider's glimpse at a seldom seen part of Japanese society.  Originally published in Japanese in 2000, this is the first English translation of the work, which won the prestigious Kaiko Takeshi Prize in Japan.  Edward Fowler, able translator of this book, is also the author of San’ya Blues (1998), which dealt with the same area from an entirely different point of view.

The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant (WW Norton, US and Knopf Canada)

Journalist Vaillant spins a gripping true tale centering on the mysterious disappearance of a former timber scout in 1997 following the felling of a 300-year-old Sitka Spruce in Canada's Queen Charlotte Islands.  The indigenous Haida people held that the mutant tree began its life as a human child, and its death was mourned accordingly in much of the region.  Vaillant's "eco-mystery" casts light on timber harvesting not only in the Pacific Northwest of North America, but also by logical extension on logging practices throughout the world.  In November, 2005, the book was awarded the prestigious Governor General's Literary Award in Canada.

The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky (Houghton Mifflin)

In this entertaining and enlightening book, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky chronicles his family's fascinating experiences living among the nomadic Eveny people of Siberia, whose "partnership" with reindeer has shaped their way of life through generations.  Drawing on nearly twenty years of field work and presenting a host of colorful characters and anecdotes to illustrate his encounters, Vitebsky shows how the Eveny carve out a life in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth and how their unique way of life is inevitably changing.

(end of release)

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