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Orange Prize for Fiction


The Orange Prize for Fiction celebrates women’s writing and is one of the UK’s most prestigious literary awards. It is awarded annually for the best full-length novel by a female author of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK in the preceding year.

The prize was established to recognise the contributions of female writers who Kate Mosse, the founder,  believed were often overlooked in other major literary awards, and also in reaction to the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Man Booker Prize. The 2005 winner, Lionel Shriver, revealed that she changed her name from Margaret Ann Shriver because she believed "men had an easier life".


The winner of the prize receives a cash prize , along with a bronze sculpture called the Bessie created by artist Grizel Niven, the sister of actor and writer David Niven.


Website: www.orangeprize.co.uk/home



Latest News

The 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction has been won by Téa Obreht for The Tiger's Wife.

The 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction has been won by Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna.

The 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist is:

Wolf Hall - Hilary MantelThe Very Thought of You - Rosie Alison
The Lacuna - Barbara KingsolverA Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore
Black Water Rising - Attica Locke

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle - Monique Roffey


A Gate at the Stairs

A Gate at the Stairs

With America quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to university - escaping her provincial home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn into the life of...

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A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.' Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of...

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An Equal Stillness

An Equal Stillness

Jennet Mallow is born in Yorkshire in the 1920s but her interest in art and creativity alienates her from her family, her father who is a priest, her conventional sister and her emotionally stunted mother. Jennet moves to London in search of a more exciting life and finds it in her new environment and in the handsome and enigmatic figure of the painter David Heaton. When Jennet falls pregnant,...

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Bel Canto

Bel Canto

The poignant -- and at times very funny -- new novel from the author of THE MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT, shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Latin terrorists storm an international gathering hosted by an underprivileged country to promote foreign interest and trade, only to find that their intended target, the President, has stayed home to watch his favourite soap opera on TV. Among the hostages are a...

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Burnt Shadows

Burnt Shadows

In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is...

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Fugitive Pieces

Fugitive Pieces

Jakob Beer is seven years old when he is rescued from the muddy ruins of a buried village in Nazi-occupied Poland. Of his family, he is the only one who has survived. Under the guidance of the Greek geologist Athos, Jakob must steel himself to excavate the horrors of his own history. A novel of astounding beauty and wisdom, Fugitive Pieces is a profound meditation on the resilience of the human...

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Half of a Yellow Sun

Half of a Yellow Sun

The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in...

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Home

Home

Hundreds of thousands of readers were enthralled and delighted by the luminous, tender voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Now comes HOME, a deeply affecting novel that takes place in the same period and same Iowa town of Gilead. This is Jack's story. Jack - prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames, gone twenty years - has...

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Lullabies for Little Criminals

Lullabies for Little Criminals

Baby is twelve years old. Her mother died not long after she was born and she lives in a string of seedy flats in Montreal's red light district with her father Jules, who takes better care of his heroin addiction than he does of his daughter. Jules is an intermittent presence and a constant source of chaos in Baby's life - the turmoil he brings with him and the wreckage he leaves in his wake....

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Miles from Nowhere

Miles from Nowhere

Joon is a young Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father's infidelity and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides she's better off on her own and sets out on a harrowing and sometimes tragic journey, exposing herself to all the pain and difficulty of a life lived on the...

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Molly Fox's Birthday

Molly Fox's Birthday

Dublin. Midsummer. While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house to a playwright friend, who is struggling to write a new work. Over the course of this, the longest day of the year, the playwright reflects upon her own life, Molly's, and that of their mutual friend Andrew, whom she has known since university. Why does Molly never celebrate her own birthday, which...

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On Beauty

On Beauty

Set in New England mainly and London partly, "On Beauty" concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kipps, the confusions - both personal and political - of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right...

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Scottsboro: A Novel

Scottsboro: A Novel

Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and within seconds the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. A young journalist, whose only connection to the incident is her overheated social conscience, fights...

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Small Island

Small Island

It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn't know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to...

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The Accidental

The Accidental

The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. "The Accidental" is at once a mysterious...

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The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin

Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death. Chief among these was the...

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The Idea of Perfection

The Idea of Perfection

Harley Savage is a large, rawboned, plain person with a ragged haircut and a white t-shirt coming unstitched along the shoulder. Douglas Cheeseman is a big-eared man who avoids his own reflection, and has bored his wife into leaving him. They are not the usual suspects for a burgeoning romance.

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The Invention of Everything Else

The Invention of Everything Else

Louisa is an imaginative and curious chambermaid who, while cleaning rooms at the New Yorker Hotel, stumbles across a man living permanently in room 3327, which he has transformed into a scientific laboratory. Brought together by a shared interest in the pigeons that nest in the hotel, Louisa discovers that the mysterious guest is Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant - and most neglected -...

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The Lacuna

The Lacuna

'You had better write all this in your notebook, she said, the story of what happened to us in Mexico. So when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.' Bo rn in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salome. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s...

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The Night Watch

The Night Watch

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at...

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The Road Home

The Road Home

'On the coach, Lev chose a seat near the back and he sat huddled against the window, staring out at the land he was leaving ...' Lev is on his way to Britain to seek work, so that he can send money back to Eastern Europe to support his mother and little daughter. Readers will become totally involved with his story, as he struggles with the mysterious rituals of 'Englishness', and the fashions and...

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The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England as young newlyweds, they have with them just a couple of suitcases and Sabine's prized green bicycle. Their intention is to stay for not more than three years, but George falls in love with the island. Sabine, however, is ill at ease with the racial segregation and unrest in her new home, and takes solace in the freedom of her green...

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The Wilderness

The Wilderness

It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake...

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We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin

When he was 15, Kevin murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a teacher. Here, our narrator, Kevin's mother, Eva, tells the story of his upbringing to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Who is to blame for teenage atrocity?

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Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall

A magisterial new novel that takes us behind the scenes during one of the most formative periods in English history: the reign of Henry VIII. Wolf Hall is told mainly through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, a self-made man who rose from a blacksmith's son in Putney to be the most powerful man in England after the king. The cast also includes Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Anne Boleyn and Henry's...

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