AFRICA: The 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing was awarded to NoViolet Bulawayo for her short story entitled "Hitting Budapest." Also shortlisted were Uganda's Beatrice Lamwaka and Botswana's Lauri Kubuitsile. All of the five shortlisted stories have been published in the award anthology, To See the Mountain and Other Stories.

SOUTH AFRICA: The winners of the M-Net Literary Awards were announced in Cape Town in June. The awards are among South Africa's most pretigious and are awarded in four language categories: English, Afrikaans, Nguni and Sotho. Ingrid Winterbach won in the Afrikaans language for her novel Die benederyk.

AFRICA: The winner of the Commonwealth Book Awards Best Book in the region of Africa is The Memory of Love by Sierra Leone's Aminatta Forna. Forna also won the overall Commonwealth Prize for Best Book. Winning Best First Book in the Africa region was Cynthia Jele of South Africa for Happiness is a four-letter word.

AUSTRALIA: The shortlist for the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards in the category of fiction include: Geraldine Brooks for Caleb's Crossing, and Amanda Lohrey for Reading Madame Bovary. The winner will be announced in September.

AUSTRALIA: The Australian Society of Authors is delighted to announce that G.L.Osborne is the winner of the 2011 Barbara Jefferis Award, for Come Inside. "The Barbara Jefferis Award is offered annually for 'the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society' ". In addition to the winning novel, the shortlist included: Like Being a Wife by Catherine Harris, Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor, The Good Daughter by Honey Brown, and Sustenance by Simone Lazaroo.

CANADA: The 2011 CBC Literary Awards in the short story category was awarded to Ontario writer Meghan Adams for "Snapshots from My Father's Euthanasia Road Trip, or Esau". Adams is currently at the University of Toronto and working on her first short story collection. Vancouver's Gina Leola Woolsey took too honors inthe "creative nonfiction" category for her tale "My Best Friend."

CANADA: Two Canadians won the Commonwealth Prize best books award in the Canada and Caribbean region. The Best Book prize whent to Emma Donoghue for Room and the Best First Book award went to Katrina Best for Bird Eat Bird.

CANADA: The 2011 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel went to Louise Penny's Bury Your Dead. The award for Best Juvenile/Young Adult Crime Book went to Alice Kulpers for The Worst Thing She Ever Did.

CANADA: The 2011 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, which is part of the British Columbia Book Prizes was awarded to Gurjinder Basran for her novel, Everything Was Good-Bye. The prize is awarded for a work of fiction written by an author from British Columbia or the Yukon. Also shortlisted was Recipes from the Red Planet by Meredith Quartermain.

CANADA: The 2011 Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in the English language, awarded to a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant, has been awarded to Billie Livingston For her collection, Greedy Little Eyes. Also shortlisted was Darcie Friese Hossack's Mennonites Don't Dance and Teri Vlassopoulos's Bats or Swallows.

CANADA: Kathleen Winter of Newfoundland has won the 2011 Atlantic Book Award for her novel Annabel. Nova Scotia's Johanna Skibsrud was awarded the Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award for her first novel, The Sentimentalists. The book was also the winner of the 2010 Giller Prize.

CHILE: The 2010 National Prize for Literature, a biennial award, was given to Isabel Allende. Allende is the fourth woman to receive this prize, joing Gabriela Mistral, Marta Brunet and Marcela Paz.

JAPAN: Sharing the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize for 2010 is Mariko Asabuki for her third novel, Kikotowa. Asabuki, who is 26, is a recent graduate of Keio University's masters degree program. The award is presented semi-annually in January and July. Previously announced in Belletrista was Akiko Akazome's win.

MEXICO: Maruza Vilalta, a Mexican author, playwright and theatre director, was presented the National Prize for Arts and Sciences for 2010. Born in Barcelona in 1932, Vilalta moved to Mexico with her family at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.

NEW ZEALAND: Wellington writer, Pip Adams wins the 2011 New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction with her short story collection, Everything We Hoped For. Kate Camp has won the New Zealand Post Book Award for poetry for her collection The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls. On the shortlist for the fiction award was Charlotte Grimshaw's The Night Book.

NEW ZEALAND: Dame Fiona Kidman won the 2011 Prime Minister's Award for her significant contribution to New Zealand literature. An extensive literary biography of Kidman is available on Random House New Zealand's website.

SPAIN: Ana Maria Matute was awarded the 2010 Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Premio Miguel de Cervantes) lifetime achievement award. The 85-year-old Matute is only the third woman to have won the award which was established in 1976 and is awarded annually to honor an outstanding writer in the Spanish language.

UNITED KINGDOM: The longlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced July 26th. This year's list includes Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch, Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvette Edwards, Far to Go by Alison Pick, and The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers. The shortlist will be announced September 6th, the winner on October 18th.

UNITED KINGDOM: On the list of finalists for the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded in March to Philip Roth, were Chinese author Wang Anyi, Italian author Dacia Maraini, and American authors, Marilynne Robinson and Anne Tyler.

UNITED KINGDOM: The 2011 James Tait Black Prize for fiction has been awarded to Tatjana Soli for her novel The Locus Eaters. In addition to the winner, on the shortlist was Julie Orringer for The Invisible Bridge.

UNITED KINGDOM: The 2011 Orange Prize for fiction was awarded to Serbian/American author Téa Obreht for her debut novel The Tiger's Wife. At 25, Obreht is the youngest-ever author to take the prize, which is awarded for "excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing (in English) throughout the world (published in the UK).

UNITED KINGDOM: The 2011 Costa Book Awards were presented earlier this year. Maggie OFarrell won the award for novel with The Hand that First Held Mine. Winner for "First Novel" is Kishwar Desai for Witness the Night. The 2011 Costa "Book of the Year" was awarded to Jo Shapcott, also the winner in the poetry category, for her collection Of Mutability, her "first new work in over a decade and in part influenced by her experience of breast cancer."

UNITED KINGDOM: Recent awards by The Society of Authors: The 2011 Betty Trask Prize was awarded to Indian-born Anjali Joseph for her novel, Saraswati Park. Also receiving an award of £6,000 was Laura Barton for Twenty-One Locks. "Betty Trask left a bequest to the Society of Authors in 1983 to fund a prize for first novels written by authors under the age of 35 in a romantic or traditional, but not experimental, style. The prize money… must be used for foreign travel. The prize is open to published and unpublished novels." Included in one of three 2011 Somerset Maugham Awards is Miriam Gamble for her collection of poetry, The Squirrels are Dead, and Alexandra Harris for her non-fiction work: Romantic Moderns:English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. The prize is awarded annually to British authors under the age of 35 for a published work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, and, like the Betty Trask Prize, the prize money must be used for foreign travel. The McKitterick Prize is given annually to an author over the age of 40 for a first novel, published or unpublished. This year's award went to Emma Generson for Grace Williams Says it Loud.

UNITED STATES: The 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction went to Jennifer Egan for her novel, A Visit from the Good Squad. Women also won in several other categories. See the association's website for additional information.

UNITED STATES: Deborah Eisenberg received the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. Roughly 320 novels and short story collections by American authors published during the 2010 calendar year were considered. The honored book brings together four volumes of Eisenberg's work. Also finalist were Jennifer Egan for A Visit from the Good Squad and Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule.

UNITED STATES: The 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Jennifer Egan for A Visit from the Good Squad. Kay Ryan took honors for poetry for her collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems.

UNITED STATES: The 2011 Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction went to Melinda Moustakis for her collection, Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories and Amina Gautier for her collection At Risk. The Flannery O'Connor Awards were established to "encourage gifted emerging writers by bringing their work to a national readership. The winner is chosen from the over 300 manuscripts submitted, and winners are published by the University of Georgia Press.

UNITED STATES: On the short list for the 2010 The Story Prize are Yiyun Li for her collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and Suzanne Rivecca for Death is Not an Option. The prize was won by Anthony Doerr.

UNITED STATES: The 2011 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel was awarded August 20th to Connis Willis for her novels, Black Out and All Clear. Best short story went to Mary Robinette Kowal for "For Want of a Nail published in Asimov's.

UNITED STATES: Argentine author Angélica Gorodischer has been awarded a 2011 World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. Women on the World Fantasy shortlists this year include: Lauren Beukes, N. K. Jeminsin, Karen Lord, Nnedi Okorafor, Elizabeth Bear, Elizabeth Hand, Rachel Swirsky, Karen Joy Fowler, and Joyce Carol Oates.

UNITED STATES: On the short list for the 2011 Edgar Award for Best Novel (crime) is Laura Lippman for I'd Know You Anywhere and Tana French for Faithful Place. The 2010 Agatha Awards, which honor the "traditional mystery," books "best typified by the works of Agatha Christie" and others, and which contain no explicit sex or "excessive gore or gratuitous violence" were awarded this spring. The award for Best Novel went to Canada's Louise Penny for Bury Your Dead. Best First Novel went to Los Angeles writer Avery Aames for The Long Quiche Goodbye.