The 10 finalists in this year's Kiriyama Prize have been announced.

The Complete Stories by Australia's David Malouf (Random House) and Mister Pip by New Zealand's Lloyd Jones (Text) were both named on the fiction shortlist. They will compete with The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones (HarperCollins), Mosquito by Roma Tearne (HarperCollins), and I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen (Penguin).

The nonfiction finalists are: The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Tom Bissell (Knopf), East Wind Melts the Ice by Liza Dalby (Random House), India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha (Pan Macmillan), The Talented Women of the Zhang Family by Susan Mann (University of California Press), and The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific by Julia Whitty (Houghton Mifflin).

Worth US$15,000 (A$16,000) in each category, the Kiriyama Prize is awarded annually ‘in recognition of outstanding books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and of South Asia.'

To be eligible, a book must be written in or translated into English and published in the US or Canada, but can be written by an author from anywhere in the world.

The winners of the 2008 prizes will be announced on 1 April.

For more information, visit www.kiriyamaprize.org.

This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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