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The bestselling Orange Prize winners have outsold the bestselling winners of the Booker prize, according to new analysis of Nielsen BookScan sales figures. The 15th Orange Prize for Fiction is to be awarded tonight (9th June) with Booker winner Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna the two standout favourites.
The bestselling Orange Prize winner in its fifteen-year life is Andrea Levy's Small Island (Headline Review) with sales of 834,958, followed by Lionel Shriver We Need to Talk About Kevin (Serpent's Tail - 646,373) and Half of a Yellow Sun (Fourth Estate - 525,438) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Only one Booker winning book-Life of Pi with sales of more than 1m copies-has outsold any of these titles over that period. The next closest are Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (Atlantic) and Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) with sales of 512,093 and 439,601 respectively.
Kate Mosse, co-founder of the prize, said she was "thrilled" at the news. "It was always really important to us that the prize should be outwards focused not inwards, and would connect readers and writers together. So I'm delighted to learn this."