Annal:2001 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Kiriyama Prize in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2001 Kiriyama-Fiction winner
- Score: 10.51
There is conflict in the whanau. The young man Te Rua holds a ‘secret for life, the one to die with’. But he realises that if he is to acknowledge and claim his daughter, the secret will have to be told.
“The Sisters” are threatening to drag the whanau through the courts. Buy why? What is really going on?
Meanwhile, wider events are encroaching. Visitors will arrive in numbers to this East Coast site, wanting to be among the first in the world to see the new millennium. There are plans to be put into action, there’s money to be made, and there’s high…
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2001 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.53
A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America…
A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria…
A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon…
Lives already in motion, unsettled by war, and about to change beyond reckoning—their pasts blurred and their destinies at once defined and distorted by an inconceivable event. For that man was bound for the desert of Los Alamos, the woman unexpectedly en route to a refugee camp, the girl at Ground Zero…
Elena Poniatowska, Deanna Heikkinen
- 2001 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
Elena Poniatowska’s best and most accessible work, Here’s to You, Jesúsa! is a rich, sensitive retelling of the life of Jesúsa Palancares de Aguilar. Born in Oaxaca in the early 1900s, she loses her mother at a young age and lives with her father until one of his girlfriends beats and stabs her. Moved to her godmother’s house, Jesúsa serves as a maid until she reunites with her father during the Mexican Revolution and joins the army of General Jesús Carranza. In the army, Jesúsa is forced to marry another soldier who beats and abandons her. On one such occasion…
The Death of Vishnu: A Novel
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2001 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.52
At the opening of this masterful debut novel, Vishnu lies dying on the staircase he inhabits while his neighbors the Pathaks and the Asranis argue over who will pay for an ambulance. As the action spirals up through the floors of the apartment building we are pulled into the drama of the residents’ lives: Mr. Jalal’s obsessive search for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja’s longing for the wife he has lost; the comic elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi movie. Suffused with Hindu mythology, this story of one apartment building becomes…
American Son: A Novel
- 2001 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
Told with a hard-edged purity that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, American Son is the story of two Filipino brothers adrift in contemporary California. The older brother, Tomas, fashions himself into a Mexican gangster and breeds pricey attack dogs, which he trains in German and sells to Hollywood celebrities. The narrator is younger brother Gabe, who tries to avoid the tar pit of Tomas’s waywardness, yet moves ever closer to embracing it. Their mother, who moved to America to escape the caste system of Manila and is now divorced from…
