Annal:2000 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction

From AwardAnnals

Results of the Kiriyama Prize in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

The time is our own time. The place is Sri Lanka, the island nation formerly known as Ceylon, off the southern tip of India, a country steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition—and forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself.

Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the…

The Toughest Indian in the World

Sherman Alexie

2000 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
Score: 6.5

In these stories we meet the kind of American Indians we rarely see in literature—the upper and middle class, the professionals and white-collar workers, the bureaucrats and poets, falling in and out of love and wondering if they will make their way home. A Spokane Indian journalist transplanted from the reservation to the city picks up a hitchhiker, a Lummi boxer looking to take on the toughest Indian in the world. A Spokane son waits for his diabetic father to return from the hospital, listening to his father’s friends argue about Jesus’ carpentry skills as…

The Hero's Walk

Anita Rau Badami

2000 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
Score: 6.5

In a small town by the Bay of Bengal in India, Sripathi Rao, a headstrong man and disenchanted copywriter, lives in his crumbling ancestral home, uncomfortably aware of the encroaching modern world. Then, early one morning, Sripathi is awakened by a call from Canada: his long-estranged daughter and her husband have been killed in a car accident. Their surviving seven-year-old child, Nandana, is about to become his reluctant ward. Yet Nandana has never met her grandfather, has never been to India, and hasn’t spoken a word since the tragedy.

Steeped in the colors, customs, and sensuality of India, The Hero’s Walk is a moving story that shows the potential for heroism in the small acts of ordinary people. It presents a family in all its messy, glorious contradictions with insight, humor, and compassion. And it marks the arrival of a gifted writer of uncommon talent and heart.

The Years with Laura Díaz: A Novel

Carlos Fuentes, Alfred MacAdam

2002 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
2000 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
Score: 12.52

In this radiant hope-filled new novel, Carlos Fuentes gives us a richly painted portrait of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Laura Díaz—a woman who becomes as much a part of our history as of the Mexican history she observes and helps to create. Filled with brilliantly colored scenes and heartbreaking dramas, the epic story of The Years with Laura Díaz is also a novel of subtle and penetrating psychological insight.

As in Fuentes’s masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz, the action begins in the state of Veracruz and then moves…