It is the literary award that has bestowed instant celebrity on some of the brightest writers in the English language.

Now the Man Booker Prize is being exported to Asia with the aim of introducing authors who are little known outside their home countries to a global audience.

Today in Hong Kong the winner of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize will be chosen from a shortlist of five Asian authors. The winner will receive £4,800 and the promise of a huge boost in sales, particularly in Britain and America.

The organisers hope that the new prize will give momentum to an interest in the works of Asian writers and provide greater exposure for those who do not write in English.

Adrienne Clarkson, who chairs the panel of three judges, told The Times: “These authors gave a different perspective on things and the price is very important and a wonderful initiative. Asian literature should be better known.”

Competition has been fierce, with 243 writers submitting their works. All had to be presented in English, although one condition was that none should yet have been published in the language to ensure that the prize would be open to the widest possible array of writers.

A list of 23 was culled from the initial submissions, from which five finalists were chosen by the judges. The shortlisted novels encompassed stories about Filipino migrant workers, a murder mystery in Delhi, an epic about life on the Mongolian steppes, the love affairs of a transvestite medium in Burma and the Asian financial crisis.

The finalists comprise José Dalisay, a Filipino university lecturer and the author of Soledad’s Sister; Reeti Gadekar, a Delhi native who penned Families at Home; Jiang Rong, a Chinese writer, for his bestseller Wolf Totem; Nu Nu Yi Inwa, a prolific Burmese author, for Smile as They Bow, and Xu Xi, a Hong Kong native of Chinese-Indonesian descent, with her Habit of a Foreign Sky.

Ms Clarkson is a former Governor-General of Canada, who arrived in that country in 1942 as a refugee from Hong Kong. She said: “In the back of our minds we knew that these books had to be readable.”

She described a five-month process of reading and rereading, and exchanging e-mails and telephone calls with her two fellow judges, André Aciman, the Egyptian-born author who is now based in New York, and Nicholas Jose, the novelist, who is a former Australian cultural attaché to China.

Mr Jose described the final decision as an agonising process: “It was exciting to have such a range of work from very different countries and generations.”

Four of the authors will be in Hong Kong to hear which of them has won the prize – with an additional $3,000 to go to the translator if the work was not originally written in English. Only Jiang Rong will be absent, confined to Beijing by his doctors because of an ear infection.

Ms Clarkson said that there had been little disagreement among the panellists over the final choice. “It just flowed out of our list of five and we were all happy with that.”

Peter Gordon, the chairman of the administrative committee, said: “If the authors were already published in English then there would not be many submissions and we might reward an act of commercial serendipity rather than an act of creation.”

The judges emphasised that they had been universally impressed by the quality of the writing.

The shortlist

José Dalisay
Dalisay, born in 1954, writes in English and Filipino and has published 15 books of his stories, plays and essays. He is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of the Philippines and has lectured in Britain, Australia and Italy

Reeti Gadekar
Born and brought up in New Delhi, Gadekar has a doctorate in German literature and worked variously as a librarian, translator and teacher before turning to full-time writing in 2006

Jiang Rong
The 61-year-old, who writes under a pseudonym and guards his real identity carefully, is a retired professor of political science from a university in Beijing. He lived among nomadic communities in Inner Mongolia for 11 years, has been jailed twice for political activities and was an editor of Beijing Spring during the brief Democracy Wall period in 1979. He won a $100,000 advance from Penguin for Wolf Totem, which will be published in English in March

Nu Nu Yi Inwa
Born in 1957 in the village of Inwa, near Mandalay, she has written more than 15 novels and 100 short stories since 1984. The author lives in Rangoon and has travelled abroad briefly, to Oxford and to a writers’ programme in Iowa. The Burmese censors took a year to give permission for the publication of Smile as They Bow which, like most of her works, is set among the rural poor and social outcasts. It will be published in English by Hyperion East next September

Xu Xi
The Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong left her 18-year career in corporate life in 1998 to take up writing. She is the author of six books of fiction and essays and compiled and edited the first comprehensive anthologies of Hong Kong literature in English. She teaches creative writing at Vermont College in the United States and at the University of Hong Kong

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy