Scuba Rhapsody, ‘Mr. Pip’ Split $30,000 Kiriyama Prize

By Edward Nawotka -- Publishers Weekly, 3/31/2008

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.

And this is how The Guardian covered the story:

Mister Pip wins Kiriyama
The Kiriyama prize for literature has been awarded to Lloyd Jones's novel of a war-torn Pacific island, Mister Pip, and to a study of life by the Pacific Ocean, The Fragile Edge, by journalist and documentary-maker Julia Whitty.

Established in 1996 to "contribute to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia", the Kiriyama is a satisfyingly eccentric international literary prize. It admits fiction and non-fiction writing about parts of the US, Canada and South America, all of China, North and South Korea and Japan, south and south-east Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands. Writers, however, may "reside anywhere". The prize is for English-language writing only, but unlike most major awards, it also considers work in translation. The $30,000 purse is split equally between the fiction and non-fiction winner.

Though the Kiriyama is little-known in the UK, at least one of the winners is familiar.
Jones's novel, which describes the powerful impact of Dickens's Great
Expectations on a young island girl caught up in a vicious civil war, has
already achieved critical and popular success. It won the 2007 Commonwealth
writers' prize and was a hotly-tipped shortlist contender for last year's
Man Booker prize. With this award, Jones joins previous Kiriyama winners
Michael Ondaatje, Haruki Murakami and Suketu Mehta.