High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Preeta Samarasan Malaysian author writing in English whose first novel, Evening Is the Whole Day, won the Hopwood Novel Award (while she was doing her MFA at the University of Michigan), was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009, and was on the longlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction.. A number of short stories have also appeared in different magazines; “Our House Stands in a City of Flowers” won the Asian American Writer’s Workshop/Hyphen (magazine) short-story award in 2007.