Well, lookee here: our very own Kelly Ana Morey has been named as one of the ten finalists (out of 165 eligible!) for the ninth annual Kiriyama Prize for her second novel, Grace is Gone (Penguin).

Patricia Grace won this award in 2001, and a tasty morsel it is. A tidy $30,000 will be shared between the fiction and non-fiction categories.

The prize is awarded to ‘outstanding books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and of the South Asian subcontinent’. Authors can be from anywhere, as long as the subject matter relates to that area. The Pacific Rim is defined by them as ‘the countries bordering the Pacific on all sides, as well as South Asia’.

The Kiriyama Prize is well-known internationally – previous prizewinners have been of the calibre of Peter Carey, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje, or the amazing Tim Winton (Dirt Music – extraordinary). Last year’s fiction winner was Shan Sa’s gut-wrenching book The Girl Who Played Go which I reviewed back in 2003.

The other four fiction finalists are:

Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers, Rupa Bajwa, The Sari Shop, Ha Jin, War Trash, Perumal Murugan (translated by V. Geetha), Seasons of the Palm.

The non-fiction finalists are:

Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway, Charles Wohlforth, The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change, Philip Short, Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare and Masayo Duus (translated by Peter Duus), The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders.

For more information about the finalists check out the Kiriyama site.

The winners will be named on March 29, 2005. Fingers crossed for Kel – be nice for her to be able to toss her hair (if indeed she was a hair-tosser) and chat about a big win at the upcoming Auckland Readers and Writers Festival… And doesn’t she deserve it. I told her only this morning (note: she’s a Friend of leafsalon, yeah) that it’s a shame and a crime that I have not yet reviewed Bloom and Grace is Gone. The reason is that, having had the good fortune to receive both books together, I was unable to stop myself reading them back to back, so enamoured was I with her… gaggle? pride? sneer? growl? of gutsy chicks. Now of course, I have to review them both together which seems like a big job, and too hard. But no. They are all in my head. Watch this space. Next week.

Must dash now, though, as a romantic weekend away sans sprogs and avec my work-sodden husband beckons. Yes, tomorrow morning we slip on our matching slinky leisure-wear and jet away to… Great Barrier. Hey, it’s exotic to us. Mind you, the supermarket’s exotic to me without kids. Back Monday. Oh, and don’t forget: the annual Unity Books (19 High Street, Auckland City) sale starts at 10am this Sunday. Be there or be… at the beach.