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British author wins Orange Prize
07/06/2006 12:25 - (SA)
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| British author Zadie Smith poses with her novel On Beauty. (Sang Tan, AP) |
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London - British author Zadie Smith, who first made a breakthrough with her novel White Teeth, has won the Orange Prize for Fiction awarded annually to women writers.
At a ceremony in London late on Tuesday, Smith said she was "stunned" to win the £30 000 prize for her latest novel, On Beauty.
Her two previous works, White Teeth and The Autograph Man, were shortlisted for the women-only award in 2001 and 2003 but failed to win.
On Beauty was passed over for the main Man Booker Prize last year, but the Orange judges hailed it as a "literary tour de force".
The other authors vying for the prize were Sarah Waters for The Night Watch, Carrie Tiffany for Everyman's Rules For Scientific Living, Hilary Mantel for Beyond Black, Nicole Krauss for The History Of Love and Ali Smith for The Accidental.
The central character in On Beauty is Howard Belsey, a white English liberal professor at an East Coast university in the US.
His nemesis is Monty Kipps, a black conservative academic who has enjoyed considerably more professional success.
The comic novel follows the professional rivalry between the two men and the tangled relations which draw their families together.
Smith took EM Forster's Howards End as her template, changing the characters and settings, but using the same plot structure.
The Orange Prize was set up in 1996 to celebrate fiction written by women. - Sapa-dpa
- SAPA
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