Writers Paul Theroux and Joe Tsujimoto will both read from their work at the Hawai'i Book and Music Festival, as the Hawai'i Literary Arts Council presents them with the prestigious 2009 Elliot Cades Awards.

The prolific Theroux, who divides his time between his North Shore and Cape Cod homes, is the author of more than 30 novels and short story collections, as well as 16 books of nonfiction. His latest is a novel, "A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta."

He has won numerous awards and is perhaps best known for his caustic and witty commentary on various far-flung places in such works as "The Great Railway Bazaar" (1975), "Kingdom by the Sea" (1983), "The Happy Isles of Oceania" (1992), "Riding the Iron Rooster" (1988) and "Dark Star Safari" (2002).

Joe Tsujimoto, a native New Yorker, teaches English at Punahou School and is the author of "Lighting Fires: How the Passionate Teacher Engages Adolescent Writers" (Boynton/Cook, 2001) and short-story collection "Morningside Heights: New York Fictions" (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2007) — a series of semi-autobiographical works about the coming of age in the 1960s of a Japanese-American boy, whose parents moved to New York after having been interned during World War II. "Morningside Heights" and Tsujimoto's nonfiction work on motivating young writers has been critically praised locally and nationwide.