Kiriyama prize: Kiran Desai among finalists

Indian-origin author Kiran Desai's bestseller novel The Inheritance of Loss has made it to the final five in the fiction category for the prestigious Kiriyama Prize.

Of the 10 finalists for the award, one each for fiction and non-fiction works will be named on March 27 as the winner of the prize that recognises 'outstanding books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and of South Asia'.

Desai's book, which has won rave reviews, has already been awarded the 2006 Man Brooker Prize. The Nepalese movement for an independent state is the tumultuous backdrop for 36-year-old Desai's richly textured book.

Competing with Desai for the fiction prize are Haruki Murakami for Blind Willow, Sleeping woman, Ma Jian for Stick Out Your Tongue, Madeleine Thien for Celebrity and Lois-Ann Yamanaka for Behold the Man.

Desai was born in New Delhi and spent her first years in India before moving Britain at the age of 14. A year later, she relocated to the United States where she completed her schooling and later attended Bennington College; Hollins University and Columbia University, where she studied creative writing, taking two years off to write Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.

Talking of the characters in The Inheritance of Loss, and of her own life, she says, "The characters of my story are entirely fictional, but these journeys (of her grandparents) as well as my own provided insight into what it means to travel between East and West and it is this I wanted to capture. The fact that I live this particular life is no accident. It was my inheritance."

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 non-fiction memoir Red Dust (2001), making Ma Jian the second author (following Luis Alberto Urrea) to be recognised by the Prize judges for both fiction and non-fiction.

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 the story of three outcast sisters in turn-of-the-century Hawai'i.