Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and Orange Broadband Award for New Writers. Winners. Shortlists. News.

About the Literary Award- The Orange Broadband Prizes

The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (official site) is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes, awarded annually for the best original full-length novel by a female author of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK in the preceding year. No doubt the name will change once broadband is obsolete.

The winner of the book award receives £30,000, along with a bronze sculpture called the "Bessie" created by artist Grizel Niven, the sister of actor/writer David Niven.

2005 saw the introduction of the new Orange Broadband Award for New Writers which takes the form of a £10,000 bursary, provided by Arts Council England.

2008 Orange Broadband Fiction Prize Winner- Rose Tremain on The Road Home to Glory

tremain_rose 9.15pm, London, 4 June 2008 – British author Rose Tremain (left)has won the thirteenth Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction with her tenth novel The Road Home (Chatto & Windus). Tremain is no stranger to the world of literary prizes, having both won and judged major awards in the past and was also awarded a C.B.E. in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours List for her services to Literature. Three of her novels are currently in development as films.

The Road Home is about an eastern European immigrant seeking work in Britain. Tremain beat out five other authors, including three debutantes, for the £30,000 ($59,000) award, open to female authors writing in English whose works were published in Britain in the past year.

At an awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, hosted by Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction Co-Founder and Honorary Director, Kate Mosse, the 2008 Chair of Judges, Kirsty Lang, presented the author with the prize money and the ‘Bessie’, a limited edition bronze figurine. Both are anonymously endowed.

Surprisingly, despite rave reviews, and her status one of Britain's most celebrated authors The Road Home was not even longlisted for the Man Booker prize."I was a bit upset not to have been longlisted for the Man Booker," Tremain (below right) told the Guardian newspaper in England . "In this country, prizes are like bumps in the road, sleeping policemen. You can't pretend they are not there, and anyone who says they don't care about them is being disingenuous. So to have won one of the major prizes feels great."

Kirsty Lang, Chair of Judges, said: “The judges felt that this was a powerfully imagined story and a wonderful feat of emotional empathy told with great warmth and humour.”

The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible. The Orange Prize is awarded to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman.

Rose Tremain, The Road Home>> Buy from Amazon .co.uk-

Synopsis: '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 fads of the London scene. We see the road Lev travels through Lev's eyes, and we share his dilemmas: the intimacy of his friendships, old and new; his joys and sufferings; his aspirations and his hopes of finding his way home, wherever home may be.

Rose Tremain writes novels, short stories and screenplays. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have been translated into numerous languages and have won many prizes, including the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Awards and the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Three of her novels are currently in development as films.

Review sniipets of The Road Home

Glamour
'Tremain allows us to see our country's wonders and failings as if for the first time'

The Gloss
`A thoughtful, moving, timely novel'

Literary Review
`It is Rose Tremain's ability to pluck triumph from disaster which
makes her such an engaging writer..'

Express: Rev'd Lianne Kolirin
`...an interesting and at times poetic, take on the new immigrant
experience,'

Red Magazine: Rev'd Alex Clarke
`A moving story, beautifully told.'

Sunday Herald: Rev'd Brian Morton
`a strikingly alert and humane profile of migrant labour...wild
and beautiful and full of woe'

The Sunday Telegraph
'This is a finely balanced novel of urgent humanity...The Road
Home should keep you gripped...and fraught with anxious sympathy...'

The Sunday Times
'...filled with emotional richness, complex sensibility and a
passionate insistence on the humanity of the poor'

Scotland on Sunday
`...some beautifully affecting writing about nostalgia and a
father's pain. Their reunion made me cry'

The Guardian
`...a classic work by the gifted Tremain'

Debut Author Joanna Kavenna Wins 2008 New Writers Prize for Inglorious

British debut author Joanna Kavenna has won the 2008 Orange Broadband Award for New Writers with her novel Inglorious (Faber & Faber).

Chair of Judges, Shami Chakrabarti, presented the £10,000 bursary, provided by Arts Council England, to the author at the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London.

Shami Chakrabarti, Chair of Judges said: ”Dostoevsky meets Bridget Jones in this glorious story of pain, humour and hope. Joanna Kavenna combines courage and elegance in creating an anti-heroine for the 21st century.”

Launched in 2005 as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, the emphasis of the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers is on emerging talent and the evidence of future potential.

All first works of fiction - including novels, short story collections and novellas, written in English by a woman of any age or nationality and published as a book in the UK - are eligible. First time authors can be entered for both the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers in any one year.

The Award was launched in 2005 in partnership with Arts Council England. Renewing their commitment to the partnership with Orange, Arts Council England recently committed a further £30,000 towards bursary awards for the winners of the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers. By offering a bursary to a novelist or short story writer for her first publication, the Arts Council is able to support the professional development of a writer at a crucial stage in her career.

Inglorious>>Buy from Amazon by Joanna Kavenna- authors website

Synopsis: Rosa Lane is a dynamic journalist in her thirties, already the picture of London achievement. Her handsome boyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon soon after the death of her mother, staring at her computer screen at work, she fails to see the point, walks out of her job – and begins her long fall from modern grace.

Within days, this smart, educated woman is dependent on the patience and charity of herfriends. She soon finds that most of them – especially her best friend – are far less supportive than she had imagined. What's more, she simply cannot understand their beliefs and desires anymore.

What happens next is comic and unbearable, as Rosa tries to find work, to wade through the great literature that she has never read (and never will), to appease her bank manager and to feel the excitement of a hopeless affair. When she visits old friends in the Lakes, she descends into a pit of benevolent, fecund domesticity. Meanwhile, he ex and his unctuous lover announce their marriage…

Joanna Kavenna (above left))- authors website

Joanna Kavenna had, by the age of 24, written seven apparently unpublishable novels, as well as a doctorate. She spent some years trying to make a living by freelance writing, combining this with disastrous stints as an amanuensis.

Eventually, exile seemed the best option, so she spent some years living in America, Germany, Scandinavia and France. This habit for nervous travel eventually produced her first published book, The Ice Museum, after which she lived in Paris and London while writing Inglorious, which is her first novel.

2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction Shortlist

Nancy Huston, Fault Lines - details

Sadie Jones, The Outcast- details

Heather O’Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals- details

Rose Tremain, The Road Home- Winner details

Patricia Wood, Lottery- details

Charlotte Mendelson: When We Were Bad- details

Orange Broadband 2008 Other Shortlisted Titles

Nancy Huston, Fault Lines>> Buy from Amazon.co.uk

Sol is a highly gifted six-year-old; his adoring mother believes he is destined for greatness. Yet he is also unsettling, chillingly un-childlike. He bears the same birthmark as his father, grandmother and great-grandmother had before him. When Sol and his family make an unexpected trip to Germany, terrible secrets start to emerge. Narrated by children in each generation of the family, "Fault Lines" traces their history back through the years, from California to New York, from Haifa to Toronto and Munich. As dormant family secrets are awakened, shock waves reverberate from a hidden past into a fragile present. Domestic in focus and epic in scope, "Fault Lines" is a vibrant, richly drawn and captivating piece of storytelling. It shows what can happen when past and present collide. Birthmarks are not all that can be passed down through a family line...

Sadie Jones, The Outcast>>Buy from Amazon.co.uk

1957, and Lewis Aldridge is travelling back to his home in the South of England. He is straight out of jail and nineteen years old. His return will trigger the implosion not just of his family, but of a whole community. A decade earlier, his father's homecoming casts a different shape. The war is over and Gilbert has recently been demobbed. He reverts easily to suburban life - cocktails at six thirty, church on Sundays - but his wife and young son resist the stuffy routine. Lewis and his mother escape to the woods for picnics, just as they did in wartime days. Nobody is surprised that Gilbert's wife counters convention, but they are all shocked when, after one of their jaunts, Lewis comes back without her. Not far away, Kit Carmichael keeps watch. She has always understood more than most, not least from what she has been dealt by her own father's hand. Lewis' grief and burgeoning rage are all too plain, and Kit makes a private vow to help. But in her attempts to set them both free, she fails to predict the painful and horrifying secrets that must first be forced into the open.

As menacing as it is beautiful, "The Outcast" is a devastating portrait of small-town hypocrisy from an astonishing new voice.

An assured voice, a riveting story, and an odd, wrenchingly sympathetic protagonist. I would never have imagined this was a first novel. Lionel Shriver

In the tradition of ATONEMENT and REMAINS OF THE DAY but in her own singularly arresting voice, Sadie Jones conjures up the straight-laced, church-going, secretly abusive middle class of 1950s England. The Outcast is a passionate and deeply suspenseful novel about what happens to those who break the rules, and what happens to those who keep them. I loved reading this wonderful debut. Margot Livesey

I much admired The Outcast. Sadie Jones tells her story using minute details to convey the apparent ordinariness of her characters' lives. But from the choreography of these walking, smiling, drinking people, from their emotional repression and their children's deprivation, she conjures an atmosphere of menace and suspense that erupts into violence and tragedy. It is an impressive debut for this talented new novelist. Michael Holroyd

Sadie Jones is an important new voice. She writes in beautiful prose of terrible events, demonstrating how love denied brings brutal consequences. She conjures the repressive social climate of the 1950s with awful accuracy, and explores the hearts and minds of young people with forensic skill. A great stylist and fine storyteller. Joan Bakewell

One of Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime reads for February, Jones’ story is imbued with brooding atmosphere and drama. Understated and elegantly narrated with attention to period detail, this is a gripping love story with a twist. If you liked Atonement by Ian McEwan, you’ll love this. Harper’s Bazaar (Feb issue)

A wonderfully assured first novel. Guardian

Heather O’Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals>>Buy from Amazon.co.uk

Baby is twelve. Her mother died soon after she was born so she lives with her father - and his heroin addiction. She's grown up in Montreal' red-light district, never staying anywhere long enough to call it home, and now Baby is losing the only constant in her life; her father. He's been sent to hospital and she's been forced into foster care. She longs for his return; other people's families are no substitute for her own. Starved of affection, Baby is attracted to all the wrong people. And when her father betrays her and she is sent to a juvenile detention centre, she is more at risk than ever. Baby' survival rests on her gift for spinning stories and for cherishing the small crumbs of happiness which fall into her lap. Poised on the threshold between childhood and adult life, she is bright, funny, observant and ultimately wise enough to realize that salvation rests in her hands alone .Heather O'Neill' talent is outstanding, she is able to craft the most beautiful images and "Quercus" anticipates a remarkable future for her.

Review snippets Lullabies for Little Criminals

Publishers Weekly
O'Neill's vivid prose owes a debt to Donna Tartt's The Little Friend...Baby's precocious introspection feels pitch perfect...Tear-jerkingly effective

Independent
...vivid and poignant...a deeply moving and troubling novel

Waterstones Books Quarterly
...Baby's unique voice and the glimmer of hope provided by her intelligence and imaginative spirit live on in the mind...

Patricia Wood, Lottery>>Buy from Amazon.co.uk

Perry's IQ is only 76, but he's not stupid. His grandmother taught him everything he needs to know to survive: She taught him to write things down so he won't forget them. She taught him to play the lottery every week. And most important, she taught him whom to trust. When Gram dies, Perry is left orphaned and bereft at the age of thirty-one. Then he wins twelve million dollars with his weekly Washington State Lottery ticket, and he finds he has more family than he knows what to do with. Peopled with characters both wicked and heroic who leap off the pages, "Lottery" is a deeply satisfying, gorgeously rendered novel about trust, loyalty, and what distinguishes us as capable.

About the Author
Patricia Wood is a PhD student at the University of Hawaii, focusing on education, disability, and diversity. Lottery is inspired by her work, as well as a number of events in her life, including her father winning the Washington State Lottery. She lives with her husband aboard a sailboat moored in Ko`Olina, Hawaii. This is her first novel. Patricia has one son, Andrew, who lives in Everett, where Lottery takes place.

Review snippets Lottery

Bookseller
`It has bags of charm'

Guardian
`imbued with humour and likeability.'

Easy Living
`A witty yet poignant social commentary where the empty value of money is set against the heart-warming traits of an unquestioningly loyal soul.'

Psychologies
`Superbly written, and moving in its simplicity.'

The Herald
`A sparky, humorous debut.'

Charlotte Mendelson When We Were Bad>> Buy from Amazon.co.uk

The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness'. Claudia Rubin is in her heyday. Wife, mother, rabbi and sometime moral voice of the nation, everyone wants to be with her at her older son's glorious February wedding. Until Leo becomes a bolter and the heyday of the Rubin family begins to unravel...'As intelligent as it is funny. A beautifully observed literary comedy as well as a painfully accurate description of one big old family mess' - "Observer".'Fast-paced and engaging. Brilliant, touching and true' - Naomi Alderman, "Financial Times". 'Absolutely spellbinding, so funny, so moving, so totally believable' - Jacqueline Wilson. 'Intelligent and witty. The Rubin family may be a singular one but the delights and the difficulties its members have with sex and spirituality, food and domesticity, expectation and achievement, will have a universal appeal' - "Sunday Telegraph". 'Funny and emotionally true, this is a comedy with the warmest of hearts and the most deliciously subversive of agendas' - Book of the Month, Marie Claire. "When We Were Bad" is a warm, poignant and true portrayal of a London family in crisis, in love, in denial and - ultimately - in luck

Review snippets When We Were Bad.

The Times
'Mendelson has a rare gift when it comes to bringing her characters alive.'

Daily Mail
'This is the wickedly funny and poignant story of a Jewish family in crisis, beautifully observed and painfully authentic.'

Sunday Telegraph
`Charlotte Mendelson's portrait of a Jewish family in crisis is both extremely funny and acutely painful...'

Daily Telegraph
'Charlotte Mendelson's novel follows her previous two in focusing on British Jewish family life'

Jewish Chronicle
'Now this intense and funny tale of a priceless family ruled by a glamorous female rabbi is back.'

Culture, Sunday Times
'Mendelson combines a scattering of Jewish vernacular, wit, and appealing character portraits in her warm prose.'

Guardian
'Combining frankness with a sharp and intelligent humour, When We Were Bad is an irresistible treat.'

LondonCareers.net Magazine
'With not a work wasted, this elegant and witty drama is part family saga and part romantic comedy...'

Observer
'When We Were Bad is relentlessly good: crammed with brilliant, skewering details, for which Mendelson has a magpie's eye.'

The Scotsman
`full of cute characterisation and bone-dry detail.

The 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction Longlist

Anita Amirrezvani The Blood of Flowers

Stella Duffy The Room of Lost Things

Jennifer Egan The Keep

Anne Enright The Gathering

Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs

Tessa Hadley The Master Bedroom

Nancy Huston Fault Lines

Gail Jones Sorry

Sadie Jones The Outcast

Lauren Liebenberg The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam

Charlotte Mendelson When We Were Bad

Deborah Moggach In the Dark

Anita Nair Mistress

Heather O'Neill Lullabies for Little Criminals

Elif Shafak The Bastard of Istanbul

Dalia Sofer The Septembers of Shiraz

Scarlett Thomas The End of Mr Y

Carol Topolski Monster Love

Rose Tremain The Road Home

Patricia Wood Lottery

Press coverage of Orange Prize

BBC News
The Guardian
The Telegraph
Reuters
Bloomberg
The Times
The Globe & Mail (Canada)
The Scotsman

Orange Broadband Award for New Writers

Launched in 2005 in partnership with Arts Council England, the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers celebrates emerging female literary talent. and potential

All first works of fiction, including novels, short story collections and novellas, written by women of any age or nationality and published as a book in the UK are eligible to enter. The emphasis of the award is on emerging talent and the evidence of future potential. Books can be entered for both the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers in any given year. Judges look for writers who demonstrate excellence, originality and accessibility.'

2008 New Orange Broadband New Writer Other Shortlisted

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff - details

Inglorious-by Joanna Kavenna-Winner details

The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg- details

The Monsters of Templeton >> Buy from Amazon.co.uk by Lauren Groff

Willie Cooper arrives on the doorstep of her ancestral home in Templeton, New York, in the wake of a disastrous affair with her much older, married archaeology professor. That same say, the discovery of a prehistoric monster in the lake brings a media frenzy to the quiet, picture-perfect town her ancestors founded. Smarting from a broken heart, Willie then learns that the story her mother had always told her about her father is a lie. He wasn't the one-night stand Vi had led her to imagine, but someone else entirely. Someone from Templeton.

As Willie puts her archaeological skills to work digging for truth about her lineage, a chorus of voices from th grogg_lauren e town's past – both sinister and disturbing – rise up around her to tell their sides of the story. Willie discovers the curse of the Temple family runs deep. On the end, dark secrets come to light, past and present blur, old mysteries are finally put to rest, and the surprising truth about more than one monster is revealed.

Lauren Groff (right) was born in Cooperstown, New York, which is the model for Templetown. She has a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has won fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. Groff's stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares amongst others. She lives in Gainsville, Florida with her husband.

The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg

Nyree and Cia O’Callohan live on a remote farm in the east of wh leinenberg_lauren at was Rhodesia in the late 1970s. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, theirs is a seductive childhood laced with African paganism, mangled Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Their world extends as far as the big fence, erected to keep out the ‘Terrs’ whom their father is off fighting. The two girls know little beyond that until the arrival, from the outside world, of ‘the bastard’, their orphaned cousin Ronin, who is set to poison their idyll for ever.

Lauren Liebenberg (right)grew up in Rhodesia during the civil war. When still a child, she left what had become Zimbabwe, following her gold miner father south to Johannesburg, where she still lives today. She has an MBA form the University of Witwatersrand and is married with two children. The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam is her first novel.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Wins 2007 Orange Fiction Award

adichie

Half of a Yellow Sun is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at a time of the vicious Nigeria- Biafra war in which more than a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood.

Three characters are swept up in the rapidly unfolding political events. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, is employed as a houseboy for a university lecturer.

Olanna, a young, middle-class woman, has come to live with the professor, abandoning her privileged life in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charismatic idealism of her new lover.

Richard is a tall, shy Englishman, in thrall to Olanna's twin sister Kainene, who refuses to belong to anyone.

They are propelled into events that will pull them apart and bring them together in the most unex 2007orange_winners pected ways. As Nigerian troops advance and they run for their lives, their ideals – and their loyalties to each other – are severely tested.

This novel is about Africa, about moral responsibility, the end of colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class and race, and about how love can complicate all these things.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka.

Her first novel Purple Hibiscus was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction. She lives in Nigeria.

Shortlists 2007

Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction Winner
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie WINNER

Arlington Parkl by Rachel Cusk

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Wheeler Hardcover)by Xiaolu Guo

The Observations by Jane Harris

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Karen Connelly Wins Orange Broadband Award for New Writers with The Lizard Cage

The Lizard Cage illuminates the tragic story of modern Burma by focusing on the lives of two people: a Burmese political prisoner and the child-labourer he befriends. A deeply layered work about the transforming power of language and as harrowing and suspenseful as the best crime novel—it is Ms. Connelly's first full-length work of fiction. As well as winning the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers, the novel was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize and longlisted for the Impac Dublin Award.

About the Winning Author

Connelly (below right) was born in Calgary, Alberta. At seventeen, she lived in a Thai village thanks to a Rotary exchange scholarship. She returned to Canada a year later. At nineteen, she left for Spain, where she lived almost two years. Having no work visa, she supported herself by, among other things, teaching English as a second language. In her spare time, she wrote about her experiences and took photographs with which to illustrate her writing. She also reworked the letters and journals, which she had written in Thailand, into a manuscript that was to become Touch the Dragon.

In 1991, she moved to France and settled in Montclar, A karen_connelly vignon, where she studied French and Spanish. Soon after, she travelled to Greece, spending most of her time on the island of Lesbos, to which she has occasionally returned. She then moved back to Canada for an extended period, writing and promoting her work.

Her first book, a poetry collection entitled The Small Words in My Body (1990), won the Pat Lowther Award for poetry in 1991. Her second book, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal (1992), won the Governor General's Award for non-fiction.

Three poetry collections followed, This Brighter Prison (1993) The Disorder of Love (1997) and The Border Surrounds Us (2000). She also compiled a book of letters, One Room in a Castle, detailing her experiences in Europe.

In 1996, she returned to Thailand and also went to Myanmar (she prefers the older name, Burma) seeking material for another book. Her experiences there served as the basis for her novel about a political prisoner, The Lizard Cage, is longlisted for the 2007 IMPAC Award.

She stayed in Thailand for two years before returning to Canada, where she married. She lives in Toronto.

Bio courtesy of wikipedia

Orange Broadband Award for New Writers
Shortlist 2007

Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan

The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly (WINNER)

Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki