Lois-Ann Yamanaka shortlisted for Kiriyama Prize | The Honolulu Advertiser

Comment, blog & share photos

Lois-Ann Yamanaka shortlisted for Kiriyama Prize | The Honolulu Advertiser | Hawaii's Newspaper

Updated at 11:54 a.m., Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Lois-Ann Yamanaka shortlisted for Kiriyama Prize

By Wanda Adams
Assistant features editor

Lois-Ann Yamanaka

"Behold the Many," Honolulu writer Lois-Ann Yamanaka's latest novel, has been listed for the Kiriyama Prize, an award given annually to one fiction and one nonfiction book that "promotes greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia."

In a press release announcing the nominations, Pacific Rim Voices, sponsor of the prize, describes the work, about three outcast sisters in turn-of-the-century Hawai'i," as "darkly beautiful."

The winners will be named on March 27 and will receive $15,000 each.

"Behold the Many" was released in paperback earlier this month and is one of five finalists. It is the first nomination for a book set in the Islands but not the first nomination for a Hawai'i author: Honolulan Robert Barclay's "Melal," set in the Marshall Islands, was nominated in 2002.

The nominees:

Fiction — "The Inheritence of Loss" by Kirin Desai, "Stick Out Your Tongue" by Ma Jian, "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" by Haruki Murakami, "Certainty" by Madeleine Thien and "Behold the Many" by Yamanaka.

Nonfiction — "The Haiku Apprentice" by Abigail Friedman, "Blonde Indian" by Ernestine Hayes, "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, "Tigers in Red Weather" by Ruth Padel and "Chinese Lessons" by John Pomfret.

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos