The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 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.
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.
2009 Winner Orange Prize | 2009 Shortlist | 2009 Longlist | Orange Prize Winners 1996 to present | Orange New Writers Award 2009 | Orange New Writers Winners 2005 to present
2009 Orange Prize Winner
4th June, 2009- The 2009 Orange Prize, has been won by American Marilynne Robinson for her novel : 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 come home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton's most beloved child. His sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father's old friend John Ames.
2009 Orange Prize Other Shortlisted
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Ellen Feldman: Scottsboro: A Novel (Picador), American, 3rd Novel
In Alabama, 1931, a posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting withwhite boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and the cry of rape goes up. A young journalist fights to save the nine...Samantha Harvey: The Wilderness (Jonathan Cape), British, 1st Novel
Samantha Hunt: The Invention of Everything Else (HarvillSecker), American, 2nd Novel
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. Louisa discovers that the mysterious...
Deirdre Madden: Molly Fox's Birthday (Faber and Faber), Irish, 7th Novel
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...Kamila Shamsie: Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury), Pakistani/British, 5th Novel
In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to GuantanamoBay. 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...
2009 New Orange Broadband New Writers Award Winner & Shortlist
Winner: Francesca Kay for An Equal Stillness , Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Jennet Mallow is born in Yorkshire in the 1920s but her interest in art and creativityalienates 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, her parents more or less force the two to marry. In the post-war austerity of the 1940s, the young couple struggles to make ends meet and Jennet finds that her home life is gradually eroding everything she has fought to achieve. Aware that David is becoming increasingly reliant on drink and tired of the dank and drab bed-sit in which they live, Jennet suggests they move to Spain. There, the bright blue skies, warm air and sunlit beaches give the couple and their children a new lease of life. Jennet begins to paint again and an agent takes an interest in her work. But as Jennet's own career begins to take off, her relationship with David sours and the two enter a destructive spiral with tragic consequences.
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Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun, Virago
The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber, Macmillan New Writing
It is 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands, and summer has been hard. Fourteen years have passed since Rachel andIsaac DuPree left Chicago to stake a claim in this unforgiving land. Isaac, a former Buffalo Soldier, is proud: black families are rare...
2009 Orange Prize Other Longlisted
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Debra Adelaide: The Household Guide to Dying (HarperCollins), Australian, 4th Novel
Desperate Housewives meets Six Feet Under in this brilliantly moving and darkly comic novel, which charts the attempts of dying heroine Delia -- a modern day Mrs Beeton -- to prepare her family for the future and lay to rest a ghost from her past.
Gaynor Arnold: Girl in a Blue Dress(Tindal Street Press), British, 1st Novel
Alfred Gibson's funeral has taken place at Westminster Abbey, and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. Dorothea is comforted by her feisty daughter Kitty, until an invitation for a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives...Lissa Evans: Their Finest Hour and a Half (Doubleday), British, 3rd Novel
In 1940, every draft of every film script had to be approved by the Ministry of Information. Newly crowned actor, script-writer, costumier and military attache must swallow their mutual distaste, ill-will and mistrust and unite for the common...Bernadine Evaristo: Blonde Roots (Hamish Hamilton), British, 4th Novel
Presents an imaginative inversion of the transatlantic slave trade - in which 'whytes' are enslaved by black people. This title brings the shackles and cries of long-ago barbarity uncomfortably close and raises questions about the society.
Laura Fish: Strange Music (Jonathan Cape), British, 2nd Novel
In 1837 an ailing Elizabeth Barrett is confined to bed, suffering debilitating illness. Longing for a return to health and mobility, she corresponds with friends, endures uncomfortable remedies, writes poetry and frets over her father and siblings. On the Barrett estate in Jamaica a Creole maidservant named Kaydia is struggling to save her child from the abusive attentions of the master. In the cane fields, indentured laborer and former slave Sheba mourns the loss of her lover.
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V.V. Ganeshananthan: Love Marriage (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), American, 1st Novel
'In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage.' An outstanding debut novel of fractured family relationships in modern Sri Lanka.
Allegra Goodman: Intuition (Atlantic Books), American, 6th Novel
A novel of human relationships, of trust and suspicion, competition and co-operation, of success and failure - of life and love in the workplace and of the sheer unknowableness of those we know best. A US bestseller, "Intuition" is a stunning...
Michelle de Kretser: The Lost Dog (Chatto & Windus), Australian, 3rd Novel
A mystery and a love story, an exploration of art and nature, a meditation on ageing and the passage of time. It offers a contemporary novel which examines the weight of history as well as different ways of trying to grasp the world.
Toni Morrison: A Mercy (Chatto & Windus), American, 9th Novel
On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, agrees to accept a slave in lieu of payment of a debt from a plantation owner, little Florens' life changes. With her intelligence and passion for wearing the cast-off shoes of her...
Gina Ochsner: The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (PortobelloBooks), American, 1st Novel
In her dusty provincial museum of fake exhibits lovingly crafted from cardboard, wire and glue, Tanya dreams of Russian art's colours and wonders when Yuri will stop fishing long enough to notice how she adores him, while she tries the zero-one...
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Preeta Samarasan: Evening Is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate), Malaysian, 1st Novel
A spellbinding, exuberant first novel, set in Malaysia, that introduces us to a prosperous Indian immigrantfamily, as it slowly peels away its closely guarded secrets. A spellbinding, exuberant first novel, set in Malaysia, that introduces us to...
Curtis Sittenfeld: American Wife (Doubleday), American, 3rd Novel
In the year 2000, in the closest election in American history, Alice Blackwell's husband becomes president ofthe US. Their time in the White House proves to be heady, tumultuous, and controversial. But it is Alice's own story - that of a kind...
Miriam Toews: The Flying Troutmans (Faber and Faber), Canadian, 4th Novel
Meet the Troutmans. Hattie is living in Paris, but has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Min, her sisterback in Canada, is going through a dark period, and Min's two kids Logan and Thebes. So when Hattie receives a phone call from eleven-year...
Ann Weisgarber: The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (Macmillan New Writing), American, 1st Novel
It is 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands, and summer has been hard. Fourteen years have passed since Rachel and Isaac DuPree left Chicago to stake a claim in this unforgiving land. Isaac, a former Buffalo Soldier, is proud: black families are rare...
Orange Prize Winners 1996 to present
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2009: Marilynne Robinson – 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 come home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain.
2008: Rose Tremain - The Road Home
Lev is on his way to Britain to seek work, so that he can send money back to Eastern Europe to supporthismother and little daughter. This book shows readers the struggles that he faces with the rituals of 'Englishness', and the fashions and fads...
2007: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
Set in Nigeria in the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war. This novel is about Africa: about moralresponsibility; about the end of colonialism; about ethnic and tribal allegiances; about class and race; and the ways in which love can...
2006: Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Set in New England mainly and London partly, this work 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 questions about what life does to love.2005: Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin
Two years ago, Eva Khatchadourian's son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is...
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2004: Andrea Levy - Small Island
In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving, multi-award winning novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a lightness of touch and a generosity of spirit that challenges and uplifts the reader.
2003: Valerie Martin - Property
Property is theft, so they say, and in this novel, the property is both an abundant sugar plantation and theformer slave who is now the owner's mistress and the mother of his only child. Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a...
2002: Ann Patchett - Bel Canto
Terrorists storm a gathering hosted by an underprivileged country to promote foreign interest and trade. When the translator plays a vital role in the subsequent relationships between different nationalities, it is the terrorist strike that most...
2001: Kate Grenville - The Idea of Perfection
The Idea of Perfection is a funny and touching romance between two people who've given up on love. Setin the eccentric little backwater of Karakarook, New South Wales, pop. 1374, it tells the story of Douglas Cheeseman, a gawky engineer with jug...
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2000: Linda Grant - When I Lived in Modern Times
Evelyn Sert journeys to Tel Aviv, where Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany are determined to forge amodern consciousness in the heart of the Middle East. Her story weaves together national identity, terrorism, love and the art of hairdressing.
1999: Suzanne Berne - A Crime in the Neighborhood
10-year-old Marsha is in turmoil following the collapse of her parents' marriage, and the brutal murder of a local boy. When the shy bachelor from next door begins to take an interest in Marsha's mother, Marsha is drawn into a cruel spiral of...
1998: Carol Shields - Larry's Party
A novel which sets out to illustrate how men have changed, and how masculinity is defined in a post-feminist world. It covers the life of a man from 1977, when he was 27 years old, to 1997, and two strands run through the book: work and goodness.
1997: Anne Michaels - Fugitive Pieces
The prize-winning, bestselling debut novel from Anne Michaels, reissued with a striking new cover JakobBeer 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...
1996: Helen Dunmore - A Spell of Winter
Catherine and her brother, Rob, don't know why they have been abandoned by their parents. Incarceratedin the enormous country house of their grandfather, they create a refuge against their family's dark secrets as the outside world moves towards...
New Orange Broadband New Writers Award Winners 2005 to present
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2009 Francesca Kay for An Equal Stillness
Born in 1924, Jennet Mallow grows up in Yorkshire, the daughter of a minister haunted by memories of warand a mother who craves the Blue Mountains of her childhood in Jamaica. Entranced by the act of drawing from an early age, Jennet moves to...
2008 Joanna Kavenna Inglorious
Rosa Lane is a fashionable journalist in her thirties, already the picture of London achievement. Herboyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon, staring at her computer...
2007 Karen Connolly The Lizard Cage
Teza once electrified the people of Burma with his protest songs against the dictatorship. Arrested by the Burmese secret police in the days of mass protest, he is seven years into a twenty-year sentence in solitary confinement, cut off from his...
2006 Naomi Alderman Disobedience
By the age of 32, Ronit has left London and transformed her life. She has become a cigarette-smoking, wise-cracking, New York career woman, who is in love with a married man. But when Ronit's father dies she is called back into the very different...
2005 Diana Evans 26a
Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a...
