2011 Orange Prize for Fiction

The shortlist for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced today. You can read about the full list of nominees in our previous blog posting. A little drum roll, please......Here are the shortlisted authors:

• Room, Emma Donoghue (Irish)
• The Memory of Love, Aminatta Forna (British/Sierra Leonean)
• Grace Williams Says It Loud, Emma Henderson (British)
• Great House, Nicole Krauss (American)
• The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht (Serbian/American)
• Annabel, Kathleen Winter (Canadian)

The Orange Prize for Fiction, in its sixteenth year, celebrates excellence, originality, and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the world. This year, three of the finalists (Henderson, Obreht, and Winter) are debut novelists! The winner will be feted in an award ceremony on June 8th and will receive, in addition to a cash prize, a limited edition bronze statue known as "The Bessie." Who do you think the winner will be??

We Think Women Rock!

The Orange Prize for Fiction is the UK's only annual book award for fiction written by a woman. The prize was established in 1996 to celebrate fiction by women throughout the world and to promote it to the widest range of readers possible. It is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman in the English language, regardless of her nationality.


The long list for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced today, and it includes nine debut novels. The list includes the author of the newly released hot novel, The Tiger's Wife (Tea Obrecht) and the winner of the just-announced National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction (Jennifer Egan). Here are all the authors on the long list:


•Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - Sudanese; 3rd Novel
•Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate) - British; 10th Novel
•Room by Emma Donoghue (Picador) - Irish; 7th Novel
•The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi (Bloomsbury) - Indian; 1st Novel
•Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty (Faber and Faber) - British; 6th Novel
•A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair) - American; 4th Novel
•The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Bloomsbury) - British/Sierra Leonean; 2nd Novel
•The London Train by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape) - British; 4th Novel
•Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson (Sceptre) - British; 1st Novel
•The Seas by Samantha Hunt (Corsair) - American; 1st Novel
•The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna (Faber and Faber) - British; 2nd Novel
•Great House by Nicole Krauss (Viking) - American; 3rd Novel
•The Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone (Chatto & Windus) - American; 3rd Novel
•The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - Serbian/American; 1st Novel
•The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (Viking) - American; 1st Novel
•Repeat it Today with Tears by Anne Peile (Serpent's Tail) - British; 1st Novel
•Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Chatto & Windus) - American; 1st Novel
•The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin (Serpent's Tail) - British/Nigerian; 1st Novel
•The Swimmer by Roma Tearne (Harper Press) - British; 4th Novel
•Annabel by Kathleen Winter (Jonathan Cape) - Canadian; 1st Novel

This year's five-person judging panel includes the novelist Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring, etc). The short list will be announced on April 12, with the awards ceremony to be held on June 8. Bettany Hughes, Chair of Judges, said "It was a huge tussle to get the list down to twenty, but what we have is a gorgeous, widely varied longlist - we'll certainly enjoy re-reading each and every one as we make tough choices to select the Orange Prize shortlist for 2011."


Last year's winner of the Orange Prize was Barbara Kingsolver, for her novel The Lacuna. Previous winners of the prize are Marilynne Robinson, Rose Tremain, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Zadie Smith, Lionel Shriver, Andrea Levy, Ann Patchett, Valerie Martin, Kate Grenville, Linda Grant, Suzanne Berne, Carol Shields, Anne Michaels, and Helen Dunmore.

The UK-based Guardian offers jacket covers (European), descriptions, and reviews of all of the books on the Orange Prize long list.

PS: We hope you get a chance to check out our window display this month in honor of March being National Women's History Month -- with this year's theme being "Our history is our strength."

Kingsolver Wins Orange Prize for Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver's most recent novel, The Lacuna, has just been named the winner of this year's Orange Prize for Fiction. The novel tells the story of Harrison Shepherd, taking the reader on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover, highlighting the estrangement of art and politics in the US. "We chose The Lacuna because it is a book of breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy," said Daisy Goodwin, chair of judges. Kingsolver was previously shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 1999 for her novel, The Poisonwood Bible (it was also a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize that year).

In an interview with Cynthia Crossen in The Wall Street Journal last year, Kingsolver talked about her passion for research: "The best research gets your fingers dusty and your shoes dirty, especially because a novel is made of details. I had to translate places through my senses into the senses of my readers. I had to know what a place smelled like, what it sounded like when it rained in Mexico City. There's no substitute for that. I've been steeped in evidence-based truth."

The other finalists for this year's fiction prize were Rosie Alison, The Very Thought of You; Attica Locke, Black Water Rising; Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall; Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs; and Monique Roffey, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle.You can read more about the Orange Prize at our previous blog posts here and here.

Kingsolver is the author of six other novels, two collections of essays, a book of poetry, and three nonfiction books, including the bestselling book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, published by Harper Collins in 2007. In 2002 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. In 1998 she established the Bellwether Prize, honoring fiction addressing issues of social justice. [Sidenote: The most recent winner of the Bellwether Prize is former Portland resident Heidi Durrow, for her novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.]

Kingsolver rew up in rural Kentucky and earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

There is a great quote from the author on her website: "What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall."

2010 Orange Prize Long List

Yesterday the long list for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced. The Orange Prize, in its second decade, aims to "promote accessibility, originality and excellence" in writing by women. The shortlist will be announced on April 20th, and the award ceremony for the fiction prize, as well as for the Orange Award for New Writers, will take place June 9th. Previous winners of the Orange Prize for Fiction include Marilynne Robinson, Valerie Martin, Ann Patchett, Lionel Shriver, Rose Tremain, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Zadie Smith, and Ann Michaels. Here are the women on this year's longlist:

• Rosie Alison, The Very Thought of You
• Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
• Clare Clark, Savage
• Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds
• Roopa Farooki, The Way Things Look to Me
• Rebecca Gowers, The Twisted Heart
• M.J. Hyland, This is How
• Sadie Jones, Small Wars
• Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
• Laila Lalami, Secret Son
• Andrea Levy, The Long Song
• Attica Locke, Black Water Rising
• Maria McCann, The Wilding
• Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
• Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy
• Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
• Monique Roffey, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
• Amy Sackville, The Still Point
• Kathryn Stockett, The Help
• Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger