Kiran shortlisted for Kiriyama

NEW YORK: Indian Booker prize-winner Kiran Desai is among the five novelists shortlisted for this year’s Kiriyama prize for fiction, Pacific Rim Voices, the sponsor of the prize announced on Tuesday.

Chinese dissident author Ma Jian, Japanese icon Haruki Murakami, Canadian author Madeleine Thien and Japanese American poet and novelist Lois-Ann Yamanaka from Hawai are also up for the Kiriyama Prize for fiction, due to be announced on March 27. Two Kiriyama Prize winners, one for fiction and one for non-fiction, will share equally the $30,000 purse.

According to literary pundits, 35-year-old Desai who scooped the £50,000 Booker prize last year for her émigré tale The Inheritance of Loss is an early favourite to win.

But she faces tough competition from Japanese authors Murakami and Ma Jian whose slender but powerful book of stories set in Tibet, Stick Out Your Tongue, follows his earlier Kiriyama Prize nomination for the non-fiction memoir Red Dust (2001).

“This year’s shortlists present a particularly interesting blend of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ voices. For example, in fiction our judges chose Haruki Murakami, whose name is synonymous with modern literature from Japan; Ma Jian, whose stories about his homeland of China are so powerful they were banned in that country; and Lois-Ann Yamanaka, whose use of the Hawai’i Creole language she grew up speaking has often put her at the centre of discussions about the unbreakable link between language and culture,” said Jeannine Stronach, Kiriyama Prize manager.

There are five other finalists in the fray for the Kiriyama Prize for non-fiction. The New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea, co-authored by mountaineer Greg Mortenson and journalist David Oliver Relin has a good shot at winning.

In 1993, Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to climb Mt. K2. Lost through Pakistan’s Karakoram Himalaya he was rescued and nursed back to health for several weeks in a non-descript village called Korphe. Touched by the village’s kindness Mortenson vowed to return to build Korphe’s first school.

This led to the founding of the Central Asia Institute, which has built 55 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortenson’s true story is competing with Tigers in Red Weather written by Ruth Padel, the great granddaughter of famed naturalist Charles Darwin.

As a struggling student Desai lived next to a bakery quite similar to the madhouse of Queen of Tarts she describes in her Krimaya-nominated novel which explores the darker side of immigration.

Desai earlier told DNA that writing her novel was torturous as it took seven years. “It is a horrible thing — the second book. The first one spills out of your imagination but the second one is incredibly tough.” Desai wrote a much longer book — 1,800 pages which she cut to 300. 

Desai is toying with the idea of a third book but was disarmingly honest in an interview with Reuters, “Good writing doesn’t come from being happy and winning prizes, it comes from doubt. It comes from a difficult place.”

Desai’s US publisher, however, is thrilled to have picked a winner. “We are very excited and happy for Kiran. This nomination for the Kirimaya Prize adds to the wonderful experience we have had in publishing her,” Deb Seager of Grove/ Atlantic Inc., told DNA.