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2011 Orange Prize Shortlist
The 2011 shortlist for the 16th annual Orange prize has been announced. The awards ceremony will be held at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre on the 8 June 2011.
The judges said:
“We are proud and pleased to announce our shortlist for the Orange Prize 2011,” commented Bettany Hughes, Chair of judges. “Our judging meeting fizzed for many hours with conversations about the originality, excellence and readability of the books in front of us – credit to the calibre of submissions this year.”
She continues, “The clarity and human-understanding on the page is simply breathtaking. The number of first-time novelists is an indicator of the rude health of women’s writing. The verve and scope of storylines pays compliment to the female imagination. There are no subjects these authors don’t dare to tackle. Even though the stories in our final choices range from kidnapping to colonialism, from the persistence of love to Balkan folk-memory, from hermaphroditism to abuse in care, the books are written with such a skilful lightness of touch, humour, sympathy and passion, they all make for an exhilarating and uplifting read. This shortlist should give hours of reading pleasure to the wider world.”
The shortlist:
- Room by Emma Donoghue (Irish) – Picador; 7th Novel
- The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (British/Sierra Leonean) – Bloomsbury; 2nd Novel
- Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson (British) – Sceptre; 1st Novel
- Great House by Nicole Krauss (American) – Viking; 3rd Novel
- The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (Serbian/American) – Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1st Novel
- Annabel by Kathleen Winter (Canadian) – Jonathan Cape; 1st Novel
The Orange Prize for Fiction
The Orange Prize for Fiction (also known as the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction) is a British prize awarded annually for the best original full length English novel authored by a woman of any nationality and published in the UK the previous year. The prize was launched in 1996 and established to recognise the work of female writers who are often overlooked for other literary prizes. This was spurred on by the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Man Booker Prize. The Orange Prize for Fiction is a very prestigious award and rated as one of the three major literary prizes of Britain along with the Man Booker Prize and The Costa Book Awards. The shortlist for this prize is normally released in June followed shortly by the announcement of the winner.
Past Orange Prize Winners:
| Year | Author | Title |
| 2009 | Marilynne Robinson | Home |
| 2008 | Rose Tremain | The Road Home |
| 2007 | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Half of a Yellow Sun |
| 2006 | Zadie Smith | On Beauty |
| 2005 | Lionel Shriver | We Need to Talk about Kevin |
| 2004 | Andrea Levy | Small Island |
| 2003 | Valerie Martin | Property |
| 2002 | Ann Patchett | Bel Canto |
| 2001 | Kate Grenville | The Idea of Perfection |
| 2000 | Linda Grant | When I Lived in Modern Times |
For more information please visit: www.orangeprize.co.uk
