Kiriyama Prize - Winners & Finalists

Celebrating Literary Voices of the Pacific Rim

The sixth annual Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize was awarded on October 20, 2001 to Maori novelist Patricia Grace for Dogside Story (Auckland: Penguin New Zealand) and to American journalist Peter Hessler for his memoir, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (New York: HarperCollins). The authors share the US $30,000 award.

The winning authors were announced on Sedge Thomson's West Coast Live (WCL) 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. You can listen to the show in its entirety at www.wcl.org. (Click Real Audio Archive on the sidebar/menu and scroll down to the October 20, 2001 broadcast.)

Patricia Grace, Dogside Story

Photo of Patricia Grace

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. With great warmth, compassion, and humor, Grace shows how the tenacious community has been divided by the effects of colonialism and cultural oppression, but also how its people are bound together by strong traditions. Dogside Story speaks not only to the culture of the Maori, but also to analogous circumstances of indigenous peoples in many parts of the Pacific Rim. Barbara Bundy, coadministrator of the Kiriyama Prize said, "We are greatly pleased to have this opportunity to help bring the work of Patricia Grace, who is already well known in her home country, to the wider attention of readers around the world." Dogside Story was also longlisted for the Booker Prize in August.

Read a review by Kathleen Tyau.

Dogside Story is available from the following publishers:

New Zealand
Penguin Books
ISBN 0143018124

USA
University of Hawai'i Press
ISBN 0824825845

UK, Canada, and Australia
The Women's Press
ISBN 0704347245

Peter Hessler, River Town

Photo of Peter Hessler

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. River Town, said author Gay Talese, "is really a literary bridge that links us with the Chinese people in ways that transcend our political and cultural differences and allow us to experience in human terms the undeniable commonality that can and does exist in a divided world."

Read a review by Patrick Lloyd Hatcher.

River Town is available from the following publishers:

USA
HarperCollins
ISBN 0060195444

Canada
HarperCollins
ISBN 0060953748

UK and Australia
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd
ISBN 0719561566

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