Nigerian author lands top prize
2007-06-07 09:44
London - Nigerian novelist Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie landed the Orange Prize on Wednesday, one of the
literary world's top awards given to women writers, for a novel
set in the 1960's Biafran civil war.
Half of a Yellow Sun had been a hot favourite with
bookmakers to land the £30 000 (R429 476) prize for the
writer, short-listed for the Orange in 2004 for her debut novel
The Purple Hibiscus.
The book tells the story of three characters - a poor
houseboy, a glamorous woman and a shy Englishman - who are
caught up in the conflict and have to run for their lives.
The Orange, set up in 1996, had a distinctly international
flavour in 2007 with authors also short-listed from Britain,
China, India and the United States for the prize, awarded to the
best book written in English by a woman over the past 12 months.
Second favourite - and also making her second appearance on
the shortlist - had been Pulitzer Prize-winning US author
Anne Tyler for Digging to America which probes cultural
differences in American society.
Kiran Desai, Xiaolu Guo
Another hotly fancied contender was Indian novelist Kiran
Desai who last year became the youngest winner of the
prestigious Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss about an
embittered judge seeking a quiet retirement in the Himalayas.
Xiaolu Guo was short-listed for her romantic comedy A
Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers which is written
in deliberately bad English.
Broadcaster Muriel Gray, who chaired the judging panel for
the Orange award, had stirred controversy by complaining that
the shortlist emerged from "a lot of dross".
'Adichie is an incredibly exciting author'
She said some of the 150 entries for the prize were so bad
she could not believe trees had been cut down to publish them.
Too many women, she said, wrote trivial novels inspired by
minor domestic problems or crises in their relationships.
But she was fulsome in praise of the winner, saying of
Adichie's novel: "This is a moving and important book by an
incredibly exciting author."
Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and Lionel Shriver rank as three of
the most prominent past winners of the prize which consistently
stokes controversy among literary critics and authors.
The late novelist Kingsley Amis once said he would not care
to win it if he were a woman. Female author AS Byatt said the
prize "ghettoised" women.