The Kiriyama Prize Web site lists the finalists in fiction and nonfiction. Included on the list is Haruki Murakami’s Dublin prize-winning collection of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and Kiran Desia’s Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss.

Details here:

About the fiction finalists

India in the 1980s, at the beginning of the Nepalese movement for an independent state, is the tumultuous backdrop for Kiran Desai’s richly textured, Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss. Chinese dissident author Ma Jian’s slender but powerful book of stories set in Tibet, Stick Out Your Tongue, follows the author’s earlier Kiriyama Prize nomination for the nonfiction memoir Red Dust (2001), making Ma Jian the second author (following Luis Alberto Urrea) to be recognized by the Prize judges for both fiction and nonfiction. World-class author and Japanese icon Haruki Murakami dishes out 24 surreal, complex, and often very funny short stories in his collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. In Canadian author Madeleine Thien’s intricately and intelligently constructed first novel Certainty, a producer of radio documentaries in Vancouver unravels the mystery of her parents’ past in Asia. In the darkly beautiful novel Behold the Many, seasoned author and brilliant linguistic stylist Lois-Ann Yamanaka gives us the story of three outcast sisters in turn-of-the-century Hawai’i.

About the nonfiction finalists

Abigail Friedman’s The Haiku Apprentice offers haiku-like, fleeting, but significant glimpses at Japanese culture in a lovingly published volume from Stone Bridge Press. Another small press title gracing the nonfiction shortlist is Blonde Indian, the moving memoir of Ernestine Hayes, who grew up in a Tlingit community in Alaska. The New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea, co-authored by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, chronicles mountaineer Mortenson’s adventurous efforts to build a school for a small village inhabited by the Balti (an Islamic ethnic group) in a remote corner of Pakistan. The great granddaughter of famed naturalist Charles Darwin, Ruth Padel, is a finalist for her Tigers in Red Weather—a paean to the charismatic tiger, a plea to save them from extinction, and a fascinating look at different cultures’ relationship to the animal. And finally, journalist John Pomfret’s thoughtful Chinese Lessons gives voice to the author’s classmates during his studies as a foreign exchange student at Nanjing University and follows the students’ stories from the Cultural Revolution of the ’60s to the present day.

What is the Kiriyama Prize?

The Kiriyama Prize was established in 1996 to recognize outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia that encourage greater mutual understanding of and among the peoples and nations of this vast and culturally diverse region. The Prize consists of a cash award of US $30,000, which is split equally between the fiction and nonfiction winners.

From the AP:

Philip Roth has won yet another literary prize, this time the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, his short, bleak novel about illness and mortality.

“It’s such a slim volume,” PEN/Faulkner judge Debra Magpie Earling said Monday in a statement, “and the book haunts me, its simplicity and brutishness, the unflinching look at life. Roth never looks away, never trivialises, never shrugs. He manages to wrestle with grief, the immensity of losing self.”

The runners-up were Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Dead Fish Museum, Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes, Amy Hempel’s The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel and Edward P Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children. Roth, who will receive $15,000, is the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner, having received it in 1994 for Operation Shylock and in 2001 for The Human Stain. The PEN/Faulkner Award was founded in 1980.

It is no secret in the book world that far more books are translated into other languages than into English. Having lived in Japan (a nation that seems to devour far more literature than the U.S.) in my early 20s and then returning to the U.S., I’ve seen this firsthand — a marked provincialism of America as a symptom of the country’s complacency of empire.

The NEA seems to be trying to help to change this with the first grants for translation, which were recently announced. The news can be found here.

The National Endowment for the Arts offers the NEA International Literature Awards to provide American readers with greater access to quality foreign literary work in translation. The NEA conducts this initiative together with partner governments, with the first awards focusing on the literature of Greece and Spain. The NEA announces today that the 2007 award recipients are three nonprofit literary presses that will translate and publish a work from these countries and promote the book to American readers. The three American presses that each will receive a $10,000 NEA award are Archipelago Books of Brooklyn, NY; Dalkey Archive Press of Champaign, IL; and Etruscan Press of Wilkes-Barre, PA.

As you could probably guess, $10,000 is a drop in the bucket, but at least it’s a start.