Canada's Munro, V.S. Naipaul vie for international Booker prize

Alice Munro, Canada's celebrated doyenne of short fiction, joins other international literary stars like E.L. Doctorow and V.S. Naipaul vying for the Man Booker International Prize, organizers announced on Wednesday.

The nearly $103,000 prize, which is awarded every two years, honours the lifetime achievement by a living fiction author writing in English (or whose work is widely translated into English).

This year marks the third edition of the young prize, which was founded in 2004 and has been awarded to Nigeria's Chinua Achebe and Ismail Kadare of Albania.

The award-winning Munro is among the most accomplished writers on the Canadian literature scene and theauthor behind short story collections such as Lives of Girls and Women,The Love of a Good Woman, Runawayand Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. She was also nominated for the international Booker in 2007.

Novelist Doctorow joined fellow Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Evan S. Connell on the list. Along with U.K.-based Nobel laureate Naipaul, the remaining finalists include:

• Peter Carey (Australia).
• Mahasweta Devi (Bangladesh).
• James Kelman (Scotland).
• Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru).
• Arnost Lustig (Czech Republic).
• Antonio Tabucchi (Italy).
• Ngugi Wa Thiong'O (Kenya).
• Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia).
• Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia).

The list of nominees was and the winner will be selected by the three-member jury, composed of American author Jane Smiley, British novelist, editor and professor Amit Chaudhuri and Russian author Andrey Kurkov. Submissions from publishersare not accepted.

The winner will be announced in May, with a ceremony celebrating the author to follow in June.