The latter special honour, given for the best book that had received the Women's Prize in the past decade, was granted in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the prize (called the Orange Prize for Fiction when the book won the annual award in 2007).
Mr. Ma is also joining the board of the foundation that administers the prize, called the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
The Forward prize called it "a bold challenge to historic definitions of poetic form".
It also emerged this week that the authorities had blocked the country's only non-governmental literary prize, called Aknoon.
The Times, in a dispatch with the title "GERMANY ENRAGED BY OSSIETZKY PRIZE," called it "a slap in the face of fascism".
The headline of a Los Angeles Times piece announcing the prize called Alexievich a reporter, a term she finds almost insulting.
In accepting his prize, called the Pushkin Medal, Mr. Ursan, a former chairman and now adviser to the Syrian Writers Union, made pointedly political remarks.
Christie took the prize, calling Obama a "petulant child" and vowing that the Republicans would "kick your rear end out of the White House from this fall".
When his wife Margaret received the Nobel prize call from Oslo, it was 4am in Mexico where Borlaug was working, but he had already departed for the fields.
The Forward prize called the inclusion of three books by first and second-generation immigrants to Britain a "transformative moment in poetry publishing".
