This year's PEN/Faulkner award for fiction has been given to Kate Christensen for The Great Man. The AP (via USA Today) reported that "Christensen, author of three previous novels, will receive $15,000."
The four other finalists, each of whom gets $5,000, were Annie Dillard's The Maytrees, David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk, T.M. McNally's The Gateway and Ron Rash's Chemistry and Other Stories.
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation established the award in 1980; prior winners include Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo.
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Australian author Sonya Hartnett was awarded the sixth annual Astrid Lindgren Memorial award for literature, according to the Guardian, which noted that "the world's richest children's book award" was given to Hartnett "in recognition of a body of work known for its unflinching focus on the toughest aspects of life."
The prize, worth £407,000 (US$826,765), was established by the Swedish government in 2002 to commemorate the creator of the Pippi Longstocking series. Hartnett will receive the award from Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria at a ceremony on May 28.
The Guardian reported that Hartnett, 39, published her first novel, Trouble All the Way, "at the age of 15 and has since written 18 novels for children, young people and adults." Her book Thursday's Child won the Guardian children's fiction prize in 2002.
"I have spent a great deal of my time defending my work against those who see it as too complicated, too old in approach, too bleak to qualify as children's literature," she said. "This has been the bane of my life. I do not really write for children: I write only for me, and for the few people I hope to please, and I write for the story."
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Egyptian author Baha Taher won the inaugural International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his novel, Sunset Oasis. The Guardian reported that the award, "styling itself as the Arabic Booker . . . aims to boost the international profile of literary fiction in Arabic." Taher was awarded $50,000 and "assured of being translated into English."
Jonathan Taylor, who served as chair of the award's board of trustees and also chairs the Booker Prize Foundation, said, "We are certain that this new prize will soon achieve the reputation and success of the Booker Prize itself--we shall hope to carry the influence of new Arabic literature all over the world, in Arabic as well as in translation."