The Bookseller.com

22nd August 2008

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Favourite Tremain takes Orange

05.06.08 Anna Richardson

Rose Tremain has won the 13th Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for her novel The Road Home (Chatto), while Joanna Kavenna took home the Award for New Writers for Inglorious (Faber).
At the announcement on Wednesday (4th June) at the Royal Festival Hall, chair of judges, Kirsty Lang, said that the The Road Home was "a powerfully imagined story and a wonderful feat of emotional empathy told with great warmth and humour".

Tremain, who received £30,000 in prize money, had emerged early as the favourite from the six-strong shortlist, which also featured Sadie Jones’s The Outcast (Chatto), Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals (Quercus), Patricia Wood’s Lottery (Heinemann), Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad (Picador) and Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines (Atlantic).

The Orange prize, which was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women, regularly comes under attack, with critics questioning its role.

According to Foyles’ Jonathan Ruppin, however, the prize is now "second only to the Booker in terms of influencing UK sales, more so than the Costa, the Pulitzer or the Nobel", following a series of "outstanding winners with great commercial appeal".

Has Orange run its course?

Media Anna Richardson Orange Prize Prize Home Rose Tremain Joanna Kavenna