Kiriyama Book Prize

The Kiriyama Book 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, and the 2007 winners were just announced.

Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman won for fiction, but according to the Seattle Times, he “turned down the prize ‘on religious grounds.’ “