⇒The Commonwealth Foundation, which promotes literary achievement through the 53-member Commonwealth of Nations, has announced winners in two regional divisions for 2007. Canadian novelist David Adams Richards takes the “Canada and the Caribbean” division for The Friends of Meager Fortune, with fellow Canadian D.Y. Bechard snagging the best first novel award. In the “Europe and South Asia” division, the best novel went to Naeem Murr‘s The Perfect Man, which was longlisted for the Man Booker last year, while Booker shortlistee In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar won for best first novel. So far, this is great news for Bertelsmann, which publishes Richards and Bechard in Canada, Murr in the UK and US, and Matar in the US. (Richards is published by MacAdam/Cage in the States; Bechard doesn’t have an American publisher…yet.) Let’s see how their luck holds up when the African and South East Asia/South Pacific prizes are announced next week…
⇒Last week, the finalists for the Kiriyama Prize, “awarded annually in recognition of outstanding books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and of South Asia,” were announced in San Francisco. Kiran Desai, who won a Booker for The Inheritance of Loss, is one of the five finalists for the fiction prize, along with Ma Jian, Haruki Murakami, Madeleine Thien, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. In the nonfiction category, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin‘s NYT bestseller Three Cups of Tea is pitted against books from Abigail Friedman, Ernestine Hayes, Ruth Padel, and John Pomfret. Winners will be announced later this month.
⇒The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is looking for nominations for this year’s Asian American Literary Award, which takes into consideration “fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, memoir, stage plays and screenplays… written by an individual of Asian descent living in the United States and published originally in English.” Nominees will be accepted until April 20, with the winners announced towards the end of the year.