Poetry and Prose

Chair: Lee Ann Roripaugh

Committee Members: Mary Anne Mohanraj, Marlon Unas Esguerra

Winner:

Evening Is the Whole Day, by Preeta Samarasan

Honorable Mentions:

Happy Family, by Wendy Lee

Unending Nora, by Julie Shikeguni

Preeta Samarasan’s lushly written and startling first novel, Evening Is the Whole Day, provides a keenly etched psychological portrait of the troubled and troubling inner workings of the Rajasekharan family—an upwardly mobile Indian immigrant family living in the “Big House on Kingfisher Lane” in politically volatile Malaysia. While the claustrophobic dysfunction of the Rajasekharan family renders them, to various degrees, somewhat oblivious to the ethnic instabilities that surround them, the family’s unraveling nonetheless serves as a microcosm of larger issues of race, class, language, and gender creating fault lines throughout Malaysia. Samarasan unwaveringly and gracefully unpacks the complexities of multiple layers of postcolonial subjectivity. Her nuanced characterization, deft use of dialogue, and striking use of omniscient point of view all serve to effectively foreground Samaran’s explosively intricate and ambitious subject matter. Evening Is the Whole Day is a novel both gorgeous and necessary in its achievement.

The uneasy complexities of the plot premise in Wendy Lee’s first novel, Happy Family, are deftly played out in spare, graceful prose and a smoothly paced, riveting story line. The book is narrated in the wry and quietly compelling first-person voice of Hua, a young woman recently immigrated from China and making her way in New York City. Hua is taken up by Asian art curator Jane Templeton as an au pair for Jane’s Chinese-adopted daughter, Lily. Throughout the course of the novel, questions of belonging and identity are intriguingly posed as the surface identities of the characters are misread and misappropriated, inappropriately appropriated, and subsequently revised and complicated—propelling this captivating book toward the seeming inevitability of its conclusion.

Julie Shigekuni’s ethereal third novel, Unending Nora, is the story of four women coming into adulthood in a California community palimpsest by the cultural trauma of a previous generation’s wartime internment experience. Rendered in an impeccably elegant prose style, the characters in Shigekuni’s novel are drawn with razor-sharp precision—close-up and intimately familiar, yet simultaneously strange and unknowable. Unending Nora is haunted throughout by absence that borders on the uncanny: the absence of feeling in Nora’s hands, Nora’s disappearance, the silences of family secrets, the untold legacies of the Japanese American internment. It is a novel of quiet power and unnerving beauty.