SAN FRANCISCO: Two South Asian immigrants, who wrote about emotion and desperation underlying racial and religious conflicts, were declared winners on Tuesday of the Kiriyama Prize for outstanding books. Pakistan-born Nadeem Aslam’s novel, “Maps for Lost Lovers,” was the fiction winner while India-born Suketu Mehtas “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found” swept the non-fiction category of the annual awards.

Aslam and Mehta will share equally the 30,000 dollar cash prize presented by Pacific Rim Voices, a San Francisco-based independent group striving to promote greater understanding among the peoples of Asia and the Pacific. The prize takes its name from Seiyu Kiriyama, founder of Agon Shu, a Buddhist Association headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.

Eleven years in the making, London-based Aslam’s novel is both a moving love story and a sophisticated murder mystery set against the backdrop of a poor South Asian enclave in a British city. The story centres on Kaukab, a pious Muslim wife and mother who relies on her faith to ease her feelings of estrangement from her homeland of Pakistan and from her husband and westernized children.

The murder of Kaukabs brother-in-law and his live-in girlfriend puts in motion a year of cataclysmic change and exposes the roots of spiritual, political, racial, and interpersonal tensions that shake the community.

In Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, New York-based journalist Mehta returns to Bombay, the city of his birth, to find it drastically altered from the city he once knew, largely due to religious massacres and violence between Hindus and Muslims. To put a human face on the world’s third largest city, Mehta offers his own experiences and impressions together with a series of personal interviews with a variety of Bombays citizens.

He meets with gangsters and their victims, cops and the rich, Bollywood entertainers, and prostitutes alike. The winning books “are both fine examples of the writing rapidly emerging from the South Asian diaspora,” said Prize Manager Jeannine Stronach.

“At a time when much of the world is focused on India, Pakistan, and the nearby Middle East, these books explore many issues and ideas that will spark a dialogue that is crucial for our times,” she added.

Aslam said in a recent interview that “the book can be seen as an overview of race in Britain over the past 50 years,” according to the organizers. Mehta’s novel should be “mandatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the giant at the heart of India” and to gain a deeper appreciation of concerns dividing India and its neighbours,” said Susan Saidenberg, a competition judge.—AFP