Pacific Rim Voices has announced the winners of the 12th annual Kiriyama Prize. New Zealand author Lloyd Jones' novel Mister Pip (Text/Peng NZ) is this year's fiction winner; The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific by Julia Whitty (Houghton Mifflin) is the winner in nonfiction.

The US$30,000 (A$32,000) cash prize will be divided equally between the two winners. The prize is presented by Pacific Rim Voices, an independent non-profit organisation ‘dedicated to celebrating literature that contributes to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia.'

Kiriyama Prize manager Jeannine Cuevas-Stronach remarked about this year's awardees: ‘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. Mister Pip and The Fragile Edge make the compelling argument that one small island is the whole universe to the people who live there. In total harmony with the aim of the prize, this year's highest honours go to two books that will draw some attention not to some Pacific Rim superpower, but to less discussed, but nevertheless important, parts of the region.'

This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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