Volcano author Tom Peek’s “Mauna Kea: A Novel of Hawaii” is garnering recognition on a national level.
The book, the 69-year-old author’s second island-themed novel, has won the 2024 Nautilus Gold Medal for Fiction in the small press category. It’s published by All Night Books, an imprint of Easton Studio Press.
“Mauna Kea” was also a finalist for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize, receiving Honorable Mention in the General Fiction category. In addition, it was a finalist for their da Vinci Eye Award for its cover art and design by local artist Catherine Robbins, Peek’s wife.
“I was really happy about both sets of awards. In the case of the Nautilus award, this is a group of judges looking for books that are ‘Better Books for a Better World.’ That’s their motto. They’re looking for work that meets a certain literary standard, but also helps forward society in positive directions,” Peek, who also authored “Daughters of Fire,” recently told the Tribune-Herald.
Peek noted several previous Nautilus Gold Medal winners as heroes, including Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Louise Erdich and Amy Goodman.
“I’m in good company,” he said.
“Then when it came to the Eric Hoffer awards, we were required to read ‘The True Believer,’ which is so pertinent to what’s going on the world today, in our political science classes when I went to went to college,” Peek continued. “Here’s a guy who worked three days a week as a stevedore in San Francisco, then spent the rest of his time reading and writing, and became the working man’s grassroots philosopher and best-selling author. He’s in the tradition of those authors who went to sea, Melville, Twain, Joseph Conrad. They weren’t writing out of a university. They were writing because they were close to the ground, watching, witnessing what was actually happening.”
The central character in Peek’s narrative is a young vagabond, Erik Peterson, who — like Peek himself — left his home on the Mississippi River in his native Minnesota, sailed as a deckhand in the South Pacific and eventually made his way to Hawaii Island and Mauna Kea. Like Peek, Peterson took a job on the mountain — in Peterson’s case, as a cook at Hale Pohaku.
He encountered a mysterious domain of ancient mountain deities and the Native Hawaiians who revere them, including two wise elders who took him under their wings and a young woman with a world-weary heart akin to his own. Through his experiences with them and other islanders, Peterson learns the power of aloha and discovers an untapped reservoir of faith and courage that rekindles his hope in himself and the world.
Peek said his inspiration for penning “Mauna Kea” is rooted in “experiences on the mountain with my Native Hawaiian and other local friends who have a connection to the mountain, some of them spiritual experiences.”
“But I, as a writer, had to process them to understand what was happening. Similarly, when I got involved in the political fight to protect the mountain — with all the connections and communication I have had with astronomers as well as activists — I had to figure all that out for myself,” he explained. “That was the first thing. I needed to write the novel to understand the experiences — which were intense — that I was having, on both the cultural and the political level.
“And I started to get feedback on the manuscript from my friends, who would say, ‘You need to publish this book. People, and especially people who are not from the islands or have only come here recently, they need to understand what you have observed.’
“I realized that this narrative could be really helpful to people who don’t understand Mauna Kea, don’t understand Hawaii and don’t understand Native Hawaiians to help forward a more intelligent discussion going forward about the mountain among those people who really don’t have a feel for it.”
Peek, formerly an astronomy guide for the Mauna Kea Observatories, has long urged astronomers to heed pleas of Native Hawaiians and others opposed to further development of the mountain’s summit. He wrote the first national article about the longstanding clash, in 1998 for Sky &Telescope magazine, and numerous later commentaries for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and other U.S. dailies.
David Wilk, founder and president of Easton Studio Press, said “‘Mauna Kea’ captivated us from the moment we read it after it was submitted to us for publication.”
“All of us who worked on this amazing novel are gratified now that Tom Peek’s work is getting the attention it deserves,” he said.
Recently deceased Sierra Club leader and Mauna Kea activist Nelson Ho called the novel “an authentic, eye-opening novel that lifts the veil on the ancient traditions and modern political intrigues that underlie the longstanding controversy over telescopes on Mauna Kea.”
While he’s grateful for the awards, Peek said he’s also gratified by the response from everyday people he encounters at book readings and author signings.
“Several people have said to me, ‘The whole issue of Mauna Kea was very abstract to me until I read your book. Then I was on the mountain. I was with the people who love the mountain. And your story helped me to understand why this is important to Native Hawaiians and other islanders.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.