MANOA online v. 3

Where the Rivers Meet, the winter 2006 issue of MANOA, includes award-winning fiction by Alexis Wright and Roger McDonald. Wright is represented by an excerpt from Carpentaria, the novel that won the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. A writer, researcher, and social commentator, she is one of Australia’s best-known indigenous writers and is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

“Bullock Run,” Roger McDonald’s contribution to Where the Rivers Meet, was recently selected for inclusion in the 2008 edition of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, the prestigious American anthology series edited by Laura Furman. McDonald is the author of two books of nonfiction, Shearers’ Motel and The Tree in Changing Light, and of seven novels, 1915, Slipstream, Rough Wallaby, The Slap, Water Man, Mr Darwin’s Shooter, and The Ballad of Desmond Kale, which won the 2006 Miles Franklin Award. He lives near Braidwood, on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales.

In January, the Association of American University Presses recognized MANOA for design excellence. Two issues, Blood Ties: Writing across Chinese Borders and Varua Tupu: New Writing from French Polynesia, are to be included in the 2007 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show, which will premiere at AAUP’s annual meeting in June and tour the country.

In April, the Pele Awards were presented by the Hawai‘i chapters of the American Advertising Federation and the American Institute of Graphic Arts for work created in Hawai‘i. (Jurors are from outside the state and are affiliated with these two national organizations.) Of the 850 entries from 109 entrants, 55 received first-place Pele awards. In the category of publication design, Barbara Pope Book Design received an award for Varua Tupu.

At a ceremony in May, the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association presented the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Awards for books published in 2006. Books were nominated in thirteen categories, and Varua Tupu—edited by Frank Stewart, Kareva Mateata-Allain, and Alexander Dale Mawyer—was the winner in the excellence-in-literature category. Barbara Pope, MANOA’s designer and art editor since its inception, received the John Dominis Holt Award for “an extended history of Excellence in Hawai‘i Book Publishing.”

The 2007 Kiriyama Prize winners have been announced. Congratulations to the authors of the winning selections and the finalists!

Fiction Prize: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami
“While anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream,” Laura Miller wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “it’s the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves”—a feat performed anew twenty-four times in this career-spanning book. (Source: Random House)
Other links: New York Times archived reviews and excerpts (registration necessary)

Nonfiction Prize: Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world—one school at a time. (Source: Penguin)
Other links: PBS Audio Interview with Greg Mortenson

Fiction Finalists:
The Inheritance of Loss, Kirin Desai (Grove Atlantic)
Stick Out Your Tongue, Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Certainty, Madeleine Thien (McClelland & Stewart, Canada; Little, Brown, USA)
Behold the Many, Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Picador)

Nonfiction Finalists:
The Haiku Apprentice, Abigail Friedman (Stone Bridge Press)
Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir, Ernestine Hayes (University of Arizona Press)
Tigers in Red Weather: A Quest for the Last Wild Tigers, Ruth Padel (Walker & Company)
Chinese Lessons: An American, His Classmates, and the Story of the New China, John Pomfret (Henry Holt)

Visit the Kiriyama Prize site for a complete list of notable books.

The Kiriyama Prize recognizes outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. It is administered by Pacific Rim Voices, an organization whose aim is “to encourage greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia.”

—Compiled by Sharon Fujimoto-Johnson