Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has won the Kiriyama Prize for fiction from the Pacific Rim for his surreal collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

The non-fiction prize went to Greg Mortenson's and David Oliver Relin's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time.

Novelist Haruki Murakami of Japan, shown after winning the Kafka Prize in October 2006, has won the Kiriyama Prize.
(Petr David Josek/Associated Press)

Winners of the 11th annual Kiriyama Prize were announced Tuesday by the non-profit group Pacific Rim Voices. Each author is awarded $15,000 US in prize money.

Murakami, 58, author of Kafka on the Shore, is one of Japan's most acclaimed modern writers. Last year he won the prestigious Kafka Prize for his disorienting stories about modern life, which explore dark areas of the soul.

"From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising and relentlessly entertaining," the jury said of his work.

Man Booker prize winner Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, Canadian Madeleine Thien's debut novel Certainty, Chinese writer Ma Jian's Stick Out Your Tongue and U.S. author Lois-Ann Yamanaka's  Behold the Many were also in contention for the prize.

Three Cups of Tea is about Montana native Mortenson's journey from emaciated "climbing bum" to founder of the Central Asia Institute. The institute has built dozens of schools in parts of the world that foster Islamic extremism, including Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Journalist David Oliver Relin, from Portland, Ore., collaborated in writing Mortenson's story, which includes a kidnapping, fatwas and death threats, as well as the painful logistics of building schools in poverty-stricken areas.

Previous winners of the Kiriyama Prize, which is for books from countries around the Pacific Rim, include Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry. 

With files from the Associated Press