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 Orange Prize Winner

4th June, 2009- The 2009 Orange Prize, has been won by American Marilynne Robinson for her novel : Home (Virago), Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her novel Gilead, revisits the setting and some of the characters from her previous work, creating in Home, described by the judges, as “a kind, wise, enriching novel, exquisitely crafted.”

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. More

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... More

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... More

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... More

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... More

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 creativity alienates 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.

Other Shortlisted

Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun, Virago

A brutally honest, linguistically inventive and profoundly moving novel that will inspire a generation of readers Joon is a young Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father's... More

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... More

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. More

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... More

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... More

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. More

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. More

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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. More

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... More

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. More

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... More

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... More

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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... More

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... More

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... More

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... More

oranges-are_not_the_only_fruit

Orange Prize Winners 1996 to present

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2009: Marilynne Robinson – Home

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... More

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... More

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. More

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... More

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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. More

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... More

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... More

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... More

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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. More

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... More

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. More

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... More

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... More

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... More

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... More

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... More

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... More

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... More