Haruki Murakami has won the second Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, his third collection of short stories to be published in English.The €35,000 (£23,000) prize, which is awarded to new collections published in English during the last 12 months, is the world’s richest short story prize. The prize will be shared between Murakami and his translators, Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin.

Link to the Guardian Unlimited story.

A fantasy novel about tribes of warring birds, written by a gifted 11-year-old girl who lives in the southern-most province of China, is to be published worldwide in English.

The young author, Nancy Yi Fan, won the extraordinary opportunity by simply emailing her manuscript to the chief executive of HarperCollins, Jane Friedman, at the publisher’s New York office.

Fan has since been hailed as a prodigy by her editors who will use her book in a new attempt to establish the firm in China . Her story, Swordbird, is an epic allegory about the struggle for peace and will be printed in this country in the new year. Those who have seen it talk about it as the product of a mind as imaginative as some of the greatest names in children’s writing.

Is it as good as HarperCollins make out? Or could this turn out to be another Eragon? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Read the Guardian Unlimited article here.

Scholastic’s first quarter results for the period ended August 31 suffered in comparison to last year when the company released Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Total revenue fell to $334.9 million from $498.4 million and the net loss increased to $46.9 million from $21.2 million.

Read the Publisher’s Weekly article here.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed by HarperCollins that inspirational fiction is doing very well, especially in the romance category. Karen Kingsbury, Beverly Cleary, Lori Wick and others—regular stars on the Christian bestseller charts—are enjoying increased sales at ABA stores and also at the big-box outlets Target, Wal-Mart and Costco.

HC has the right companies to be a player in this field—its mass market imprint Avon is one of the leaders in the women’s fiction/romance category, and Harper San Francisco is one of the leaders in the religion/spirituality category. Now the two are collaborating on a new inspirational women’s trade paper fiction line called Avon Inspire, with the first books to be published in spring 2007. HSF editor Cynthia DiTiberio will be in charge of acquisition and editing and Avon publisher Liate Stehlik will oversee production, marketing, promotion and advertising. Stehlik noted that Avon Inspire’s goal is to publish “engaging stories that Christian readers can trust and love.”

Read the Publisher’s Weekly story here.

Poet Adrienne Rich and two founders of The New York Review of Books have been named recipients of honorary National Book Awards medals, the National Book Foundation announced Wednesday.

“Adrienne Rich, Robert Silvers, and Barbara Epstein have been major forces in the literary world for decades, mavericks and visionaries who have held all of us who love books and writing to the highest possible standard. They remind us that books have the power to enrich our world,” Harold Augenbraum, the book foundation’s executive director, said in a statement.

Link to the Yahoo News story.

Bloomsbury’s autumn schedule is its best yet, boasts the publisher’s chairman Nigel Newton, with books as diverse as David Blunkett’s political memoirs, the latest from William Dalrymple and Margaret Atwood, Schott’s Almanac and even the collected speeches of Gordon Brown.

Announcing first-half profits in line with the City’s own scribblings, Mr Newton said its forthcoming list was “the strongest autumn programme in our 20-year history”.

 Read the Guardian Unlimited article here.

A new “Hannibal Lecter” novel, originally scheduled to come out last year, will be published this December. Thomas Harris’ “Hannibal Rising,” which tells of the early years of literature’s most famous cannibal, is the fourth of the million-selling series that includes “The Silence of the Lambs,” made into an Academy-Award winning film starring Anthony Hopkins. The new book will have a first printing of at least 1.5 million copies.

“Now, in `Hannibal Rising,’ readers will at last learn of Lecter’s beginnings and will see the evolution of his evil,” Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, said Tuesday in a statement.

Read the Yahoo News article here.

An unfinished tale abandoned by JRR Tolkien in 1918 has been completed by his son and will be published next spring, it was announced yesterday.

Christopher Tolkien has worked for 30 years on an edited version of The Children of Hurin, a story set in the legendary land of elves, hobbits and dwarves depicted by his father in the epic trilogy The Lord Of The Rings.

Link to the Guardian Unlimited article.