Scuba Rhapsody, ‘Mr. Pip’ Split $30,000 Kiriyama Prize
By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 3/31/2008 2:58:00 PM
The Fragile Edge by Mother Jones magazine correspondent Julia Whitty and Mr. Pip, a novel by New Zealander Lloyd Jones, were named winners of the 2008 Kiriyama Prize today in San Francisco.Created in 1996 to honor books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia, the prize is sponsored by Pacific Rim Voices, a division of the San Francisco-based Kiriyama Pacific Rim Institute. Each winning book receives $15,000.
In a prepared statement, Kiriyama Prize manager Jeannine Cuevas Stronach noted: "It is often too easy for those of us who live in large and populous countries to discount the people and cultures of humbler nations," she said. "Mister Pip and The Fragile Edge make the compelling argument that one small island is the whole universe to the people who live there."
The Fragile Edge, published by Houghton Mifflin, offers a vivid depiction of the marine life on the coral reefs of French Polynesian islands of Rangiroa, Tuvalu, and Mo'orea as seen from behind a scuba mask, and Whitty renews the call to preserve the 330 coral atolls remaining on earth. Mr. Pip, out from Dial, is set during the secessionist revolution between the natives the island of Bougainville and the government of Papua New Guinea--a war that lasted from 1988-1997 and killed 20,000 people. Jones’s novel is already notable for having won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in the South East Asia and Pacific region and being shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Jones himself achieved early notoriety in New Zealand when it was reported that the cumulative advances paid to him for international rights to the book exceeded one million New Zealand dollars, the first writer from the islands ever to receive as much for a single title. There are no other articles related to this article.
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