The Life of Pi Wins 2002 New Voices Award for Fiction and Brown Wins New Visions Award

    NEW YORK, May 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Yann Martel, author of The Life of Pi,
 has been selected as the recipient of Quality Paperback Book Club's annual New
 Voices Award and Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown, has been named the winner
 of QPB's annual New Visions Award. Each award is worth $5,000.
     The Life of Pi, published by Harvest Books, chronicles the magical,
 adventurous life of Pi Patel, who spends his youth in Pondicherry, India,
 whimsically and unabashedly trying on various religions the way one might try
 on different hats.  Pi's life takes a dramatic turn when he finds himself
 floating in the Pacific Ocean, sharing a tiny raft with Richard Parker, an
 angry and hungry Bengal tiger.
     David Roth-Ey, Editor-in-Chief of Quality Paperback Book Club, said, "Yann
 Martel's inventiveness and virtuosic storytelling stunned the judging panel
 with this mesmerizing, multilayered tale."
     Brown, published by Penguin USA, is Richard Rodriguez's meditation on race
 and the historically over-simplified way that American culture conceptualizes
 it.  Rodriguez, a contributing editor at Harper's magazine and frequent guest
 essayist on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), assesses the new demographic
 profile of America and the dual impact of the Latinization of America and
 Americanization of Latinos.
     Roth-Ey said, "In a year when three of our finalists wrestled with race,
 no one fought the fight better than Richard Rodriguez."  His self-described
 "meditation on race" is deeply personal yet universally relevant.
     The New Visions Award (est. 1990) and New Voices Award (est. 1984) honor,
 respectively, the most distinctive and most promising new works of non-fiction
 and fiction offered by the Quality Paperback Book Club. For a complete list of
 QPB's previous New Voices and New Visions winners, please visit the About Us
 section at www.bookspan.com.
 
                       About Quality Paperback Book Club
     Established in 1974, Quality Paperback Book Club (www.qpb.com) is the
 cutting-edge paperback book club championing the best innovative fiction and
 nonfiction in early paperback editions.
 
                                 About BOOKSPAN
     BOOKSPAN is the premier direct marketer of general interest and specialty
 book clubs, including Book-of-the-Month Club and The Literary Guild(R).
 BOOKSPAN is a partnership between Bertelsmann Inc. and AOL Time Warner Inc.
 
 

SOURCE  BOOKSPAN