Congratulations to Scarlett Thomas whose novel THE END OF MR Y is on the Orange Broadband Prize For Fiction Longlist 2008 announced today.
She joins United Agents client Tessa Hadley, author of THE MASTER BEDROOM, and a host of other female authors to make up a list which aims to celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing. The Chairman of the Judges Kirsty Lang said “There is a great balance on this list, not only in its international reach and range of human experience, but also between first novels and some established writers that haven’t perhaps had the recognition they deserved”. The shortlist is announced on the 15th April and the winner, who receives a cheque for £30,000 and a trophy (the ‘Bessie’) is announced at a ceremony in London on June 4th.
ORANGE BROADBAND PRIZE FOR FICTION ANNOUNCES 2008 LONGLIST
Orange Broadband Award for New Writers shortlist announcement: 8 April
Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction shortlist announcement: 15 April
Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction shortlist readings: 2 June
Awards ceremony: 4 June
London, 18 March 2008: The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman, today announces the 2008 longlist. Now in its thirteenth year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing.
The judges for the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction are:
Kirsty Lang (Chair), Journalist & Broadcaster
Lisa Allardice, Editor of Guardian Review
Lily Allen, Musician
Philippa Gregory, Novelist
Bel Mooney, Novelist, Journalist & Children’s Author
“There were lots of big names in contention this year and stiff competition for places on the longlist,” commented Kirsty Lang, Chair of Judges, “so we were surprised and excited to find so many new voices that fought their way through.”
She continues, “There is a great balance on this list, not only in its international reach and range of human experience, but also between first novels and some established writers that haven’t perhaps had the recognition they deserved.”
The Prize was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible and is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman in the English language.
“The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction remains committed to bringing women’s fiction to a wider, younger and more varied range of readers,” saidHattie Magee, Head of Partnerships at Orange. “It is great to be announcing such a fantastic list that reflects the incredible range of international fiction that is available to readers today. To find our more about this years longlist visit www.orangeprize.co.uk.”
This year’s longlist honours both new and well-established writers, featuring seven first novels alongside a former Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction winner; Linda Grant, who took the prize in 2000 for When I Lived in Modern Times. Three authors appearing on this year’s list have previously been longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, and Rose Tremain was shortlisted in 2004.(1)
Any woman writing in English, whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter, is eligible. The winner will receive a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze known as a ‘Bessie’, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.
The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony to be held in The Ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall on 4 June.
Previous winners are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun(2007), Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006), Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005), Andrea Levy for Small Island (2004), Valerie Martin forProperty (2003), Ann Patchett for Bel Canto (2002), Kate Grenville for The Idea of Perfection (2001), Linda Grant for When I Lived in Modern Times(2000), Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999), Carol Shields for Larry’s Party (1998), Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces (1997), and Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter (1996).
ENDS
___________________________________________________________________
Press Enquiries
Amanda Johnson at M&C Saatchi:
Tel: 020 7543 4580 or 07715 922 180
Email: amanda.johnson@mcsaatchi.com
Tel: 020 7543 4580 or 07715 922 180
Email: amanda.johnson@mcsaatchi.com
Or
CJ Stanley, Orange
Tel: 07989 333 308
Notes to Editors
(1)
This year’s list carries three American authors, nine British authors, one Australian author, one American/Iranian author, one Turkish author, one Indian author, one Irish author, one South African author and two Canadian authors.
The following author has previously won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction: Linda Grant (2000).
The following author has previously been shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction: Rose Tremain (2004).
The following authors have previously been longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction: Stella Duffy (2004), Linda Grant (1997), Gail Jones (2006).
There are seven first novels on the 2008 longlist.
About Orange
Orange is a key brand of the France Telecom Group, providing mobile, broadband, fixed, business and entertainment services across Europe. It is one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators with more than 170 million customers on five continents.
In June, 2006, Orange became the single brand for mobile, broadband and multi-play offers. In addition, Orange Business Services became the new banner for business communications solutions. Orange Business Services is present in 166 countries with network reach in 220.
In the UK, Orange provides high quality GSM coverage to 99% of the UK population. At the end of December 2007, Orange had over 16.8 million customers in the UK – 15.6 million active mobile customers and nearly 1.14 million broadband customers.
Orange and any other Orange product or service names included in this material are trade marks of Orange Personal Communications Services Limited.
Further information about Orange and France Telecom can be found on the Orangewebsite at www.orange.co.uk or the France Telecom website at www.francetelecom.com
For further information, call the Orange press office on 0870 373 1500 or email:Orangepr@golinharris.com.
**UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL 00.01am TUESDAY 18thMARCH 2008**
Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008
Longlist Biogs and Synopses
Anita Amirrezvani
The Blood of Flowers
Headline Review
In rural seventeenth-century Iran, a spirited village girl approaches the age of marriage, only to find her destiny shattered after a comet blazes ominously across the desert sky. On the death of her beloved father, the young woman and her distraught mother are forced into a difficult new life in the fabled city of Isfahan. Taken in as house servants by her uncle Gostaham, a well-to-do carpet designer, and his demanding wife, the two women confront an unforgiving world.
When the girl blossoms as a brilliant maker of carpets under her uncle’s tutelage, the future brightens. But disaster strikes again when an impetuous act results in her disgrace, forcing her into a secret marriage. If she is to thrive, she must risk the family’s reputation and rely on her artistic genius and her extraordinary will, to save herself and her mother.
Anita Amirrezvani was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in San Francisco. For ten years she was a staff dance critic at newspapers in the Bay Area. She has received fellowships from the National Arts Journalism Program, the NEA’s Arts Journalism for Dance and Hedgebrook. She worked on The Blood of Flowers for nine years, during which time she made three research trips to Iran. She lives in Northern California.
Stella Duffy
The Room of Lost Things
Virago
Under his railway arch in Loughborough Junction, south London, Robert Sutton is taking leave of a lifetime of hard work. His dry-cleaning shop lies at the heart of a lively community, a fixed point in a changing world. And, as he explains to his successor, young east Londoner Akeel, it is also the resting place for the contents of his customers’ pockets – and for their secrets and lies.
As he helps Akeel to make a new life out of his old one, Robert also hands on all he knows of his world: the dirty dip of the Thames; the parks, rare green oases in a desert of high-rises and decaying mansion blocks; and the varied lives that converge at the junction. There is restless Australian nanny Helen, trapped in London for love; tight-sweatered, high-heeled health visitor Marylin; ex-dancer and commitment-phobe Stefan on the cusp of middle-age; fixer, runner and all-round bad lad Dean. And then there is Robert himself, who holds back his own terrible story, a secret he may never surrender.
Stella Duffy is the author of Parallel Lies, State of Happiness, Singling out the Couples,Eating Cake and Immaculate Conceit and the Saz Martin crime series. She also writes short stories and articles and for radio and theatre. She won the 2002 CWA Short Story Dagger Award for her story ‘Martha Grace’. Stella was born in the UK, grew up in New Zealand and now lives in London. As well as writing, Stella also works as an actor and improviser.
Jennifer Egan
The Keep
Abacus
In the wilds of Eastern Europe, the castle has stood for hundreds of years, steeped in blood lore and family pride. Thirty-six-year-old Danny, a damaged, cynical New Yorker arrives one night to help his mysterious cousin transform the place into a luxury hotel.
Deprived of his mobile phone and email access, starved of contact with the outside world, Danny finds it hard to adjust. The crumbling stone walls and black nights feel a world away from the well-trodden streets of Manhattan, and cousin Howie is just as alien to him.
And then things start getting really weird. A sinister old baroness, a tragic accident in a fathomless pool, a treacherous underground labyrinth – as terror overwhelms Danny, he discovers that ‘reality’ may be something he can no longer afford to believe in…
Jennifer Egan is the author of Look at Me, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, The Invisible Circus and the story collection Emerald City. Her non-fiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her family inBrooklyn.
Anne Enright
The Gathering
Jonathan Cape
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn’t the drink that killed him – although that certainly helped – it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother’s house, in the winter of 1968. His sister Veronica was there then, as she is now: keeping the dead man company, just for another little while.
The Gathering is a family epic and a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations – starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman – showing how memories warp and family secrets fester.
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? – shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and winner of the Encore Award – and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood was published in 2004. The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize 2007.
Linda Grant
The Clothes on Their Backs
Virago
In a red brick mansion block near the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl, grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sándor so violently unwelcome in her parents’ home? Vivien wants to know.
Set against the backdrop of 1970s London, The Clothes on Their Backs is a novel about survival – both everyday and heroic – and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live.
Linda Grant was born in Liverpool and now lives in London. Her first novel, The Cast Iron Shore, won the David Higham First Novel Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her second novel, When I Lived in Modern Times, won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Linda Grant is also the author of Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution; Remind Me Who I Am Again and The People on the Street: A Writer’s View of Israel.
Tessa Hadley
The Master Bedroom
Jonathan Cape
Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate’s forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother in Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it’s because she’s bored and hasn’t got anything else to do, but she can’t stop. David is married, rational, dependable: the last type to want an affair.
David’s marriage isn’t as solid as it looks, though, and he eventually takes refuge inFirenze, where he can talk to Kate about music. David’s seventeen-year-old son, Jamie, is also drawn to the old house full of books and history.
The Master Bedroom explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, lovers and friends; the past casts its long shadows in the present; men and women who were once confident they knew themselves, learn to attend to the changes unfolding inside them.
Tessa Hadley is the author of two novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and Everything Will Be All Right, as well asSunstroke, a collection of stories. She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorkerand Granta.
Nancy Huston
Fault Lines
Atlantic Books
Sol is a highly gifted but also scarily un-childlike six-year-old whose adoring mother believes is destined for greatness. He bears the same birthmark as his father, grandmother and great-grandfather before him. When Sol and his family make an unexpected trip to Germany, terrible secrets start to emerge.
Narrated by children in four generations of the same family, Fault Lines traces their history back through the years, from California to New York, from Haifa to Toronto andMunich. As dormant family secrets are awakened, shock waves reverberate from a hidden past into a fragile present.
Nancy Huston was born in Calgary, Canada, in 1953 and studied in New England andNew York. When she was twenty she went to Paris and decided to make it her home. Writing in both French and English, she translates her own work herself and is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, as well as a play, children’s books and screenplays. Fault Lines is her eleventh novel.
Gail Jones
Sorry
Harvill Secker
In the remote outback of North-West Australia, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife Stella raise a curious child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary; a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl’s limited education. Emotionally adrift, Perdita develops a friendship with an Aboriginal girl, Mary, with whom she will share a very special bond. She appears content with her unusual family life in this remote corner of the globe until Nicholas Keene is discovered murdered.
Gail Jones teaches literature, cinema and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia. She is the author of Sixty Lights which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Dreams of Speaking which was longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. One previous novel, Black Mirror, and two collections of short stories have been published in Australia and received numerous literary awards.
Sadie Jones
The Outcast
Chatto & Windus
1957, and Lewis Aldridge is travelling back to his home in the South of England. He is straight out of jail and nineteen years old. His return will trigger the implosion not just of his family, but of a whole community.
A decade earlier, his father’s homecoming takes a different shape. The war is over and Gilbert has recently been demobbed. He reverts easily to suburban life –cocktails at six-thirty, church on Sundays – but his wife and young son resist the stuffy routine. Lewis and his mother escape to the woods for picnics, just as they did in the wartime days. Nobody is surprised that Gilbert’s wife counters convention, but they are all shocked when, after one of their jaunts, Lewis comes back without her.
Not far away, Kit Carmichael keeps watch. She has always understood more than most, not least from what she has been dealt by her own father’s hand. Lewis’s grief and burgeoning rage are all too plain, and Kit makes a private vow to help. But in her attempts to set them both free, she fails to predict the painful and horrifying secrets that must first be forced into the open.
Sadie Jones lives in London. The Outcast is her first novel.
Lauren Liebenberg
The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam
Virago
Nyree and Cia O’Callohan live on a remote farm in the east of what was Rhodesia in the late 1970s. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, theirs is a seductive childhood laced with African paganism, mangled Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm.
Their world extends as far as the big fence, erected to keep out the ‘Terrs’ whom their father is off fighting. The two girls know little beyond that until the arrival, from the outside world, of ‘the bastard’, their orphaned cousin Ronin, who is set to poison their idyll for ever.
Lauren Leibenberg grew up in Rhodesia during the civil war. When still a child, she left what had become Zimbabwe, following her gold miner father south to Johannesburg, where she still lives today. She has an MBA from the University of Witwatersrand and is married with two children. The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam is her first novel.
Charlotte Mendelson
When We Were Bad
Picador
Claudia Rubin is in her heyday. Wife, mother, rabbi and sometime moral voice of the nation, it is she whom everyone wants to be with at her older son’s glorious February wedding. Until Leo becomes a bolter and the heyday of the Rubin family begins to unravel…
His calm, married, more mature sister, Frances, tries to hold the centre together, but the stresses, for Frances, force her to re-examine her own middle way and lead to a decision as shocking in its way as Leo’s has been.
Meanwhile, Claudia’s husband Norman has, uncharacteristically, a secret to hide – a secret whose imminent unveiling he can do nothing about…
Charlotte Mendelson was born in 1972 and grew up in Oxford. This is her third novel. Her second, Daughters of Jerusalem, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. Charlotte lives in London with her family.
Deborah Moggach
In the Dark
Chatto & Windus
Eithne Clay is an alluring wife and mother whose husband is away fighting in the trenches. She runs a shabby boarding house in Southwark where her lodgers, like herself, lead lives of barely respectable desperation. The War casts a long shadow over ordinary lives; times are hard while the men are away being slaughtered. Food is short and the old certainties are disintegrating around them. Eithne’s adolescent son Ralph tries to be the man of the house, while the homely young maid, Winnie, barely manages to keep it all together.
Then along comes Neville Turk, the butcher, a handsome bull of a man, who falls for Eithne and throws her life into turmoil. He woos her with choice cuts, and soon the erotic voltage of their affair wakes up the house like the newly-installed electricity. Ralph’s jealousy of this interloper grows out of control, while Winnie’s strange liaison with Alwyne Flyte, the blind lodger, has startling consequences. Meanwhile, in this house of whispers and secrets, the butcher has plans of his own, which lead to a tragic and dramatic climax.
Deborah Moggach is the author of many successful novels including, most recently,These Foolish Things and Tulip Fever. Her screenplays include the film of Pride and Prejudice, which was nominated for a BAFTA. She lives in North London.
Anita Nair
Mistress
BlackAmber
When travel writer Christopher Stewart arrives at a riverside resort in Kerala to meet Koman, Radha’s uncle and a famous kathakali dancer, he enters a world of masks and repressed emotions. From their first meeting, both Radha and her uncle are drawn to the enigmatic young man with his cello and his incessant questions about the past.
The triangle quickly excludes Hyam, Radha’s husband, who can only watch helplessly as she embraces Chris with a passion he has never been able to draw from her. And, as Koman’s life story unfolds, it captures all the nuances and contradictions of the relationships being made and unmade before his eyes.
Anita Nair lives in Bangalore and Mundakotukurussi, Kerala. Her books have been translated into over twenty-five languages. She is the author of The Better Man, Ladies Coup, The Puffin Book of World Myths and Legends and the editor of Where the Rain is Born: Writings About Kerala.
Heather O’Neill
Lullabies for Little Criminals
Quercus
Baby is twelve. Her mother died soon after she was born, so she lives with her father – and his heroin addiction.
She’s grown up in Montreal’s red-light district, never staying anywhere long enough to call it home and now she’s losing the only constant in her life: her father. He’s been sent to hospital and she’s been forced into foster care. She longs for his return; other people’s families are no substitute for her own. Starved of affection, Baby is attracted to all the wrong people, and when her father betrays her and she is sent to a juvenile detention centre, she is more at risk than ever.
Heather O’Neill was born in Montreal and moved to Virginia when her parents separated. She writes for The New York Times Magazine and the radio show, This American Life. She lives in Montreal with her partner and daughter. Lullabies for Little Criminals is her first novel.
Elif Shafak
The Bastard of Istanbul
Viking
One rainy day in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor’s surgery. ‘I need to have an abortion,’ she announces. She is nineteen years old and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life.
Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kazanci men die in their early forties, so it is a house of women, among them Asya’s beautiful, rebellious mother Zeliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. And when Asya’s Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to stay, long-hidden family secrets connect withTurkey’s turbulent past begin to emerge.
Elif Sharak was born in 1971 and is the author of six novels, most recently The Saint of Incipient Insanities, The Gaze and The Flea Palace, and one work of non-fiction. She teaches at the University of Arizona and divides her time between the US and Istanbul.
Dalia Sofer
The Septembers of Shiraz
Picador
In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. In the wake of his terrifying disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they had known.
As Isaac navigates the tedium and terrors of prison, forging tenuous trusts, his wife feverishly searches for him, suspecting, all the while, that their once-trusted housekeeper has turned on them and is acting as an informer. And, as his daughter, in a childlike attempt to stop the wave of baseless arrests, engages in illicit activities, his son, sent to New York before the rise of the Ayatollahs, struggles to find happiness even as he realises that his family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger.
Dalia Sofer was born in Iran and fled with her family in 1982. She received her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002 and has been a resident at Yaddo, an artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, NY. She currently lives in New York City.
Scarlett Thomas
The End of Mr. Y
Canongate
When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookshop, she can’t believe her eyes. She knows enough about its author, the outlandish Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas, to know that copies are exceedingly rare. And, some say, cursed.
With Mr. Y under her arm, Ariel finds herself thrust into a thrilling adventure of love, sex, death and time-travel.
Scarlett Thomas was born in London in 1972. Her previous novels include Bright Young Things, Going Out and PopCo. In 2001, she was included in the Independent on Sunday’s list of the UK’s 20 best young writers. She currently teaches English Literature and Creative writing at the University of Kent.
Carol Topolski
Monster Love
Fig Tree
Brendan and Sherilyn. A young couple in love. Each has met their soul mate, and nothing can come between them.
In fact, the Gutteridges are so wrapped up in each other that their neighbours barely know them, despite the woman next door’s nosy curiosity. Their families and their work colleagues see only the perfect couple in the perfect home, the perfect car crouching in the drive.
And then a baby is born – contaminating the pristine life in which there is only room for two. But they find the ideal solution.
What may be one couple’s happy ending is everyone else’s indescribable nightmare… Told by the Gutteridges, their families, neighbours and others who come across them in the aftermath, this perverse love story hurtles to the heart of evil – the kind of evil that could be next door to any of us.
Carol Topolski is a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her many previous roles include music festival organiser, advertising executive, nursery school director, director of a rape crisis centre and refuge for battered women, probation officer and film censor. She lives in London and is married with two daughters. Monster Love is her first novel.
Rose Tremain
The Road Home
Chatto & Windus
Like so many others, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain, seeking work. He is a tiny part of a vast diaspora that is changing British society. But Lev is also a singular man with a vivid outsider’s vision of the place we call home.
Lev begins with no job, little money and few words of English. He has only his memories, his hopes and a certain alarming skill with the preparation of food. Behind him loom the figures of his dead wife, his beloved daughter and his outrageous friend Rudy who – dreaming of the wealthy West – lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.
In front of Lev lies the deep strangeness of the British: their hostile streets, clannish pubs, lonely flats and their obsession with celebrity. London holds out the alluring possibilities of friendship, sex, money and a new career; but, more than this, of human understanding, a sense of belonging.
Rose Tremain writes novels, short stories and screenplays. She lives in Norfolk andLondon with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have been translated into numerous languages and have won many prizes, including the Whitbread Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Awards and the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Three of her novels are currently in development as films.
Patricia Wood
Lottery
William Heinemann
Perry’s IQ is only 76, but he’s not stupid. His grandmother taught him everything he needs to know to survive. She taught him to write things down so he won’t forget them. She taught him to play the lottery every week. And, most importantly, she taught him who to trust. When Gram dies, Perry is left orphaned and bereft at the age of thirty-one. Then he wins twelve million dollars with his weekly Washington State Lottery ticket and finds he has more family than he know what to do with…
Patricia Wood is a PhD student at the University of Hawaii, focusing on education, disability and diversity. Lottery is inspired by her work, as well as by a number of events in her life, including her father winning the Washington State Lottery. She lives with her husband aboard a sailboat moored in Ko’Olina, Hawaii. This is her first novel. Patricia has one son, Andrew, who lives in Everett, where Lottery is set.