LITERARY AWARDS

LITERARY AWARDS

Alfaguara prize

MADRID, Spain — Cuban-born writer Antonio Orlando Rodriguez is the winner of this year’s Alfaguara Spanish literary prize for his novel “Chiquita,” which tells the story of Espiridiona Cenda, a diminutive Cuban singer-dancer. Rodriguez now lives in the U.S.

A total of 511 works were considered for the award, which includes a prize of $175,000 and is one of the most prestigious in the Spanish language. It is sponsored by the Alfaguara publishing house.

Kiriyama Prize

NEW YORK — “Complete Stories,” a collection of short stories by Australia’s David Malouf, and Lloyd Jones’ “Mister Pip,” a fictionalized tribute to Charles Dickens set in the South Pacific, are among the finalists for the 12th annual Kiriyama Prize, which recognize books that promote a “greater understanding” of South Asia and the Pacific Rim.

The awards — sponsored by the nonprofit Pacific Rim Voices — will be given for fiction and nonfiction works, with winners dividing $30,000 between them. (For a book in translation, the author receives $10,000, the translator $5,000).

Joining Malouf and Jones in the fiction category were Nicole Mones’ “The Last Chinese Chef;” Roma Tearne’s “Mosquito;”’ and Zhu When’s “I Love Dollars,” translated by Julia Lovell.

Nonfiction choices were Tom Bissell’s “The Father of All Things;” Liza Dalby’s “East Wind Melts the Ice;” Ramachandra Guha’s “India After Gandhi;” Susan Mann’s “The Talented Women of the Zhang Family;” and Julia Whitty’s “The Fragile Edge.”

The winners will be announced April 1.

Quills

NEW YORK — A corporate co-founder of the Quills, a people’s choice book awards e started three years ago and aimed to combine “populist sensibility” with “Hollywood-style glitz,” announced last week that it will “suspend” support.

Reed Business Information gave no reason for the decision, and a company statement did not make it clear whether the awards had been placed on hiatus or ended permanently. A spokeswoman for Reed, which operates such publications as Variety and Publishers Weekly, declined to give The Associated Press any further details.

The announcement, posted on the Publishers Weekly Web site, said the plan was to “suspend” backing of the Quills, but also referred to the “dissolution” of the awards. Money raised for the Quills Literacy Foundation will be distributed to two nonprofit organizations — First Book and Literacy Partners.

A spokeswoman for NBC Universal Television Stations, the Quills’ other founder, referred questions to Reed Business Information, which was recently put up for sale by its parent company, Reed Elsevier.

The Quills were marked by black-tie ceremonies in Manhattan, with Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Donald Trump among the featured hosts and presenters. Nominated authors, in categories from romance fiction to poetry, included Stephen King, Al Gore and J.K. Rowling.

But few readers voted, and sales did not noticeably increase for winning books. The ceremonies themselves, televised on NBC stations, were widely criticized as too long and poorly planned.

PUBLISHING NEWS

Another free download

NEW YORK — Charles Bock’s “Beautiful Children, a best-selling debut novel about characters adrift in Las Vegas, is the latest book to be offered for free online.

Starting Wednesday, Bock’s novel can be downloaded from the Web site www.beautifulchildren.net/read. The free electronic edition will also be available from such leading retailers as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

“I want people to read the book,” Bock said in a statement issued last week by the Random House Publishing Group. “If that means giving it away for free online, great.”

Publishers have worried about Internet piracy and whether online text could hurt traditional sales. But lately the trend has been to make more books available on the Internet and hope that interest in all formats will be increased.

HarperCollins recently announced that books by Paulo Coelho, Neil Gaiman and a handful of others would be posted online (although not for printing or downloading). In mid-February, financial advice writer Suze Orman said on Oprah Winfrey’s television show that “Women & Money,” published in 2007, could be downloaded from Winfrey’s Web site over a period of 33 hours. More than 1 million copies of the book were downloaded and the paper edition jumped into the top 10 on Amazon.com.

Combined dispatches