Tyler McMahon and Donald Carreira Ching are the winners of the 2017 Elliot Cades Awards for Literature.

McMahon, author of three novels, received the award for an established artist. A former Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, his work examines the poverty and fear that drive immigration and the moral dilemmas that westerners face, according to the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council, which announced the honors.

McMahon’s novel “Dream of Another America” (Gival Press, 2017) follows Central American migrants striving to reach the U.S. and has been compared to John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and deemed “breathtaking” by Kirkus Reviews. His novel “Kilometer 99,” about troubled surfers abroad, won the 2015 Maria Thomas Fiction Award.

A writing teacher in the English Department at Hawai‘i Pacific University, McMahon administers the Ko‘olau Writers Workshop and edits Hawai‘i Pacific Review.

Ching won the award for an emerging artist. His first novel, “Between Sky and Sea: A Family’s Struggle” (Bamboo Ridge, 2015), tracks three brothers growing up amid substance abuse and family pressures on Oahu’s Windward shore. “Ching depicts how the sum of a person’s actions weighs heavy in Hawaii,” wrote Christopher Alm in a review for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser of the “unsparing, perceptive” novel.

A recipient of the Ian McMillan Writing Award for Fiction, Ching teaches at Leeward Community College.

McMahon and Ching will receive their Cades awards, which include cash prizes, and read their work at noon May 5 at the Honolulu Book &Music Festival at the Frank F. Fasi Civic Grounds.

The Literary Arts Council also announced that the Loretta D. Petrie Award for outstanding service to Hawaii’s literary community was bestowed on Patrice Marie Wilson, a former member of the English faculty at HPU who founded the Ko‘olau Writers Workshop, and Michael Little, a retired teacher and co-founder of Hawai‘i Fiction Writers, which conducts free monthly workshops and readings in Hawaii public libraries.