News

Canadian journalist and writer Naomi Klein has been nominated for Britain's Warwick Prize for Writing, a £50,000 ($85,700) award to be given out once every two years

A scientist, a music critic, a journalist and three novelists are also on the shortlist.

The international award can go to any "substantial" piece of writing in the English language, including works in translation.

Klein has been nominated for "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," in which she argues that moments of crisis are used to usher in radical social and economic change.

The 2009 shortlist includes Montano's Malady by Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas.

The novel takes readers on a voyage to European cities and South American ports, as the author-narrator struggles to distinguish between reality and the fictional worlds of the books he reads.

Should Vila-Matas win the inaugural award at a Feb. 24 ceremony at the University of Warwick, 30 per cent of the prize money will go to Jonathan Dunne, who translated Montano's Malady.

Another nominated novelist is Polish-born Lisa Appignanesi, whose Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 explores how the treatment of women suffering from mental illness contributed to our understanding of the condition and its treatment.

U.S. novelist Francisco Goldman is on the list for a work of non-fiction — The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi?

The book is about the investigation into the murder of Guatemalan bishop Juan Gerardi, a human-rights activist who was bludgeoned to death in 1998, shortly after releasing the report "Guatemala: Never Again," which blamed the military for most of the 200,000 deaths during a 36-year civil war that ended with peace accords in 1996.

U.S. theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman appears for Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, which proposes that the natural universe contains a ceaseless creativity that cannot be predicted.

It is this creativity, not a supernatural "Creator God," that should be viewed as divine, it argues.

Rounding off the list is U.S. music critic Alex Ross. His book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a tour of 20th-century classical music.