Haruki Murakami's collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Weeping Woman, has been awarded the Kiriyama Prize. The award was announced March 27 by Pacific Rim Voices, a nonprofit organization "dedicated to celebrating literature that contributes to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia." Previous winners of the prize include Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry.

Several Random House titles have been nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. One of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes, it is awarded annually for the best original full-length novel by a female author of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK in the preceding year. Longlist nominees for the awards are as follows:

•Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
•A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
•Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley
•Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert
•Digging to America by Anne Tyler

William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field, has been awarded the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award. The award is presented annually to a living author with a substantial connection to the American West whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition. Also announced at the same time were the finalists for the 27th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Random House nominees for the awards are as follows:

Biography:
•The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate
•Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler
•Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide by Jeffrey Goldberg

Current Interest:
• Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Fiction:
•Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
•A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight

History:
•The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

Science and Technology:
•The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors by Ann Gibbons