Orange Prize for Fiction 2010
Now in its eighteenth year, the Women's Prize for Fiction was set up to celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women throughout the world. Known from 1996 to 2012 as the Orange Prize for Fiction, it is the UK's most prestigious annual book award for fiction written by a woman and also provides a range of educational, literacy or research initiatives to support reading and writing.
More information about the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013
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Winner
The Lacuna
FaberBorn in the US and reared in a series of provincial households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salomé; his fortunes remaining insecure as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
Winner, Orange Prize for Fiction
Born in the US and reared in a series of provincial households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salomé; his fortunes remaining insecure as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.
Publisher: Faber
Barbara KingsolverBarbara Kingsolver
American novelist known for her anti-establishment stance, and the winner of the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction, with The Lacuna...
Barbara Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland but was raised near Carlisle, Kentucky, 'in the middle of an alfalfa field... between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields.' Her parents were medical and public-health workers who briefly embarked on an expedition to the Congo when Kingsolver was a child. Kingsolver describes her childhood as a rather solitary one, and used the time she spent by herself to stimulate an 'elaborate life of the mind.'
Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology.In 1986, she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988.
Her subsequent books include The Poisonwood Bible (1998) and Prodigal Summer (2000); a poetry collection, Another America (1992) and the essay collections High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder: Essays (2002). The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, made finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Barbara was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton.
She lives with her husband Steven Hopp and their two daughters, Camille and Lily, on a farm in Southwest Virginia. Her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle describes their first year on the farm and their quest for self-sufficiency.
www.kingsolver.com
Shortlist
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The Very Thought of You
Alma Books
The Very Thought of You
Rosie Alison
Shortlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate that has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple.
Publisher: Alma Books
Rosie Alison
Rosie Allison grew up in Yorkshire and read English at Keble College, Oxford. She spent ten years directing television documentaries before becoming a film producer at Heyday Films. She is married with two daughters and lives in London.
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The Lacuna
Faber
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
Shortlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Born in the US and reared in a series of provincial households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salomé; his fortunes remaining insecure as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.
Publisher: Faber
Barbara KingsolverBarbara Kingsolver
American novelist known for her anti-establishment stance, and the winner of the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction, with The Lacuna...
Barbara Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland but was raised near Carlisle, Kentucky, 'in the middle of an alfalfa field... between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields.' Her parents were medical and public-health workers who briefly embarked on an expedition to the Congo when Kingsolver was a child. Kingsolver describes her childhood as a rather solitary one, and used the time she spent by herself to stimulate an 'elaborate life of the mind.'
Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology.In 1986, she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988.
Her subsequent books include The Poisonwood Bible (1998) and Prodigal Summer (2000); a poetry collection, Another America (1992) and the essay collections High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder: Essays (2002). The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, made finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Barbara was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton.
She lives with her husband Steven Hopp and their two daughters, Camille and Lily, on a farm in Southwest Virginia. Her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle describes their first year on the farm and their quest for self-sufficiency.
www.kingsolver.com -
Black Water Rising
Serpent's Tail
Black Water Rising
Attica Locke
Shortlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
On a dark night, out on the Houston bayou to celebrate his wife's birthday, Jay Porter hears a scream. Saving a distressed woman from drowning, he opens a Pandora's Box.
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Attica Locke
Attica Locke is a screenwriter who has worked in both film and television. A former fellow at the Sundance Institute, she is working on an HBO miniseries about the civil rights movement. A native of Houston, Texas, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
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Wolf Hall
Fourth Estate
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Shortlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
England in the 1540s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the petulant king's freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock.
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Hilary MantelHilary Mantel
Since winning her first Man Booker Prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall Mantel has become one of the UK’s best known authors. Her books include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988); Fludd (1989) winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994); An Experiment in Love (1995), winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize. Her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003), was the MIND Book of the Year.
Beyond Black (2005), was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Wolf Hall (2009), was winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction; and Bring Up The Bodies (2012), her most recent novel, was winner of the Man Booker Prize, and Costa Book of the year 2012.
Hilary Mantel was born in Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.
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A Gate at the Stairs
Faber
A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore
Shortlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
With her government quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to the university town of Troy - a girl escaping her home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics.
Publisher: Faber
Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore is the award-winning author of the story collections Self-Help, Like Life and Birds of America, and the novels Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? She teaches English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
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The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Pocket Books
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Monique Roffey
Shortlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England George instantly takes to their new life, but Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill at ease with the racial segregation and the imminent dawning of a new era.
Publisher: Pocket Books
Monique Roffey
Monique Roffey was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and educated in the UK. Her debut novel, Sun Dog, was published in 2002. Since then she has worked as a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation and has held the post of Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Sussex and Chichester Universities. She lives in Kensal Rise, north-west London, where she spends most of the day in her pyjamas, writing.
Longlist
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The Little Stranger
Virago
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote The Night Watch, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.
Publisher: Virago
Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters was born in Wales and lives in London. She has won a Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and was twice shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Fingersmith and The Night Watch were both shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and Fingersmith won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and the South Bank Show Award for Literature. Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith have all been adapted for television. -
The Help
Penguin
The Help
Kathryn Stockett
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver...
There's Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from College, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared.
Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they'd be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in a search of a truth. And together they have an extraordinary story to tell...Publisher: Penguin
Kathryn Stockett
Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama, she moved to New York City, where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. She currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and daughter. This is her first novel. -
The Long Song
Headline Review
The Long Song
Andrea Levy
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize, The Long Song is breathtaking, hauntingly beautiful, heartbreaking and unputdownable.
'You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed.'Publisher: Headline Review
Andrea Levy
Andrea Levy was born in England to Jamaican parents who came to Britain in 1948. She has lived all her life in London. She is the author of Every Light in the House Burnin', Never Far From Nowhere and Fruit of the Lemon. Her fourth novel, Small Island, won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction Best of the Best, the Whitbread Novel Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It has also been adapted into a major BBC TV drama.
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The Wilding
Faber
The Wilding
Maria McCann
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
In her second novel, Maria McCann returns to 17th Century England, where life is struggling to return to normal after the horrific tumult of the Civil War. In the village of Spadboro Jonathan Dymond, a 26-year old cider-maker who lives with his parents, has until now enjoyed a quiet, harmonious existence. As the novel opens, a letter arrives from his uncle with a desperate request to speak with his father. When his father returns from the visit the next day, all he can say is that Jonathan's uncle has died. Then Jonathan finds a fragment of the letter in the family orchard, with talk of inheritance and vengeance. He resolves to unravel the mystery at the heart of his family - a mystery which will eventually threaten the lives and happiness of Jonathan and all those he holds dear.
Publisher: Faber
Maria McCann
Maria McCann lives and works in Somerset, combining teaching and writing with other interested including voluntary communities and the allotments movement. Her first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, was published in 2000 and her short fiction has been published in various anthologies.
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Secret Son
Viking
Secret Son
Laila Lalami
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
When a young man is given the chance to rewrite his future, he doesn't realize the price he will pay for giving up his past...
Casablanca's stinking alleys are the only home that nineteen-year-old Youssef El-Mekki has ever known. Raised by his mother in a one-room home, the film stars flickering on the local cinema's screen offer the only glimmer of hope to his frustrated dreams of escape. Until, that is, the father he thought dead turns out to be very much alive.
A high profile businessman with wealth to burn, Nabil is disenchanted with his daughter and eager to take in the boy he never knew. Soon Youssef is installed in his penthouse and sampling the gold-plated luxuries enjoyed by Casablanca's elite. But as he leaves the slums of his childhood behind him, he comes up against a starkly un-glittering reality...Publisher: Viking
Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing (the "African Booker") in 2006 and for the National Book Critics' Circle Nona Balakian Award in 2009. She is the author of one short story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. This is her first novel.
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Small Wars
Vintage
Small Wars
Sadie Jones
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Sadie Jones's second novel follows in the footsteps of her phenomenally successful debut, The Outsider, in exploring the darker side of 1950s society.
Publisher: Vintage
Sadie Jones
Sadie Jones lives in London. Her first novel, The Outcast, won the Costa First Novel Award, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and was a Richard and Judy Summer Reads bestseller.
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This is How
Canongate
This is How
M J Hyland
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Patrick is a loner. An intelligent but disturbed young man struggling to find his place in the world. He ventures out on his own and as he begins to find happiness commits an act of violence that sends his life horribly and irreversibly out of control. But should a person's life be judged by a single bad act? This is How is a compelling and macabre journey into the dark side of human existence and a powerful meditation on the nature of guilt and redemption.
Publisher: Canongate
M J Hyland
M J Hyland was born in London in 1968. She studied Law and English at the University of Melbourne. Her first novel, How the Light Gets In, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and her second, Carry Me Down, won the Encore Award and the Hawthornden Award, and was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and Commonwealth Writer' Prize. Hyland now lives in Manchester, where she is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.
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The Very Thought of You
Alma Books
The Very Thought of You
Rosie Alison
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate that has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple.
Publisher: Alma Books
Rosie Alison
Rosie Allison grew up in Yorkshire and read English at Keble College, Oxford. She spent ten years directing television documentaries before becoming a film producer at Heyday Films. She is married with two daughters and lives in London.
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The Rehearsal
Granta
The Rehearsal
Eleanor Catton
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theatre are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve. "The Rehearsal" is an exhilarating and provocative novel about the unsimple mess of human desire, at once a tender evocation of its young protagonists and a shrewd expose of emotional compromise.
Publisher: Granta
Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton was born in Canada and raised in New Zealand, where she has won several prizes for this, her first novel, including the 2008 Glenn Schaffer Fellowship to the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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The Savage Lands
Vintage
The Savage Lands
Clare Clark
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
It is 1704 and, in the swamps of Louisiana, France is clinging on to its new colony with less than two hundred men. Into this hostile land comes Elisabeth Savaret, one of twenty-three women sent from Paris to marry men they have never met. With little expectation of happiness, Elisabeth is stunned to find herself falling passionately in love with her husband, infrantryman Jean-Claude Babelon. But Babelon is a dangerous man to love. Witness to Elisabeth's devotion is another of his acolytes, Auguste, a young boy despatched to act as a go-between with the 'redskins'. When both Elisabeth and Auguste find their love challenged by Babelon's duplicity, the consequences are devastating.
Publisher: Vintage
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Hearts and Minds
Abacus
Hearts and Minds
Amanda Craig
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Rich or poor, five people, seemingly very different, find their lives in the capital connected in undreamed-of ways. There is Job, the illegal mini-cab driver whose wife in Zimbabwe no longer answers his letters; Ian, the idealistic supply teacher in exile from South Africa; Katie from New York, jilted and miserable as a dogsbody at a political magazine, and fifteen-year-old Anna, trafficked into sexual slavery. Polly Noble, an overworked human rights lawyer, knows better than most how easy it is to fall through the cracks into the abyss. Yet when her au pair, Iryna, disappears, Polly's own needs and beliefs drag her family into a world of danger, deceit and terror.
Riveting, humane, engaging, Hearts and Minds is a novel that is both entertaining and prepared to ask the most serious questions about the way we live.
Publisher: Abacus
Amanda Craig
Amanda Craig was born in South Africa in 1959, the daughter of anti-Apartheid journalists who covered the Sharpeville massacre. She grew up in England and Italy, attended Bedales and went on to read English at Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of five previous novels - Foreign Bodies; A Private Place; A Vicious Circle; In a Dark Wood and Love in Idleness - is children's critic for The Times and lives in London.
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The Twisted Heart
Canongate
The Twisted Heart
Rebecca Gowers
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
When Kit goes to a dance class she is hoping simply to take her mind off her studies. Soon it looks like Joe, a stranger she meets there, might do more than that. But when Kit uncovers a mystery involving the young Charles Dickens and the slaughter of a prostitute known as The Countess, she is sucked back in to the world of books, and discovers how Dickens became tangled up with this horrendous crime.
Publisher: Canongate
Rebecca Gowers
Rebecca Gowers is the author of The Swamp of Death (Hamish Hamilton, non-fiction), the true story of a fatal showdown between a late Victorian con man and a corrupt detective, shortlisted in 2004 for a CWA Gold Dagger award. Her first novel, When to Walk was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007.
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The Lacuna
Faber
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Born in the US and reared in a series of provincial households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salomé; his fortunes remaining insecure as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.
Publisher: Faber
Barbara KingsolverBarbara Kingsolver
American novelist known for her anti-establishment stance, and the winner of the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction, with The Lacuna...
Barbara Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland but was raised near Carlisle, Kentucky, 'in the middle of an alfalfa field... between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields.' Her parents were medical and public-health workers who briefly embarked on an expedition to the Congo when Kingsolver was a child. Kingsolver describes her childhood as a rather solitary one, and used the time she spent by herself to stimulate an 'elaborate life of the mind.'
Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology.In 1986, she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988.
Her subsequent books include The Poisonwood Bible (1998) and Prodigal Summer (2000); a poetry collection, Another America (1992) and the essay collections High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder: Essays (2002). The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, made finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Barbara was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton.
She lives with her husband Steven Hopp and their two daughters, Camille and Lily, on a farm in Southwest Virginia. Her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle describes their first year on the farm and their quest for self-sufficiency.
www.kingsolver.com -
Black Water Rising
Serpent's Tail
Black Water Rising
Attica Locke
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
On a dark night, out on the Houston bayou to celebrate his wife's birthday, Jay Porter hears a scream. Saving a distressed woman from drowning, he opens a Pandora's Box.
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Attica Locke
Attica Locke is a screenwriter who has worked in both film and television. A former fellow at the Sundance Institute, she is working on an HBO miniseries about the civil rights movement. A native of Houston, Texas, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
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Wolf Hall
Fourth Estate
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
England in the 1540s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the petulant king's freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock.
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Hilary MantelHilary Mantel
Since winning her first Man Booker Prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall Mantel has become one of the UK’s best known authors. Her books include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988); Fludd (1989) winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994); An Experiment in Love (1995), winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize. Her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003), was the MIND Book of the Year.
Beyond Black (2005), was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Wolf Hall (2009), was winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction; and Bring Up The Bodies (2012), her most recent novel, was winner of the Man Booker Prize, and Costa Book of the year 2012.
Hilary Mantel was born in Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.
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Black Mamba Boy
HarperCollins
Black Mamba Boy
Nadifa Mohamed
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Black Mamba Boy is a sumptuous and bittersweet journey book that starts in Aden in 1935 in war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, to Egypt, Palestine and to Britain.
Publisher: HarperCollins
Nadifa Mohamed
Nadifa's first novel, Black Mamba Boy (2009), is a semi-autobiographical account of her father's life in Yemen in the 1930s and 40s, during the colonial period. It won the 2010 Betty Trask Award, and was short-listed for numerous awards, including the 2010 Guardian First Book Award, the 2010 Dylan Thomas Prize and the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. The book was also long-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction.
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A Gate at the Stairs
Faber
A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
With her government quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to the university town of Troy - a girl escaping her home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics.
Publisher: Faber
Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore is the award-winning author of the story collections Self-Help, Like Life and Birds of America, and the novels Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? She teaches English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
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The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Pocket Books
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Monique Roffey
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England George instantly takes to their new life, but Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill at ease with the racial segregation and the imminent dawning of a new era.
Publisher: Pocket Books
Monique Roffey
Monique Roffey was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and educated in the UK. Her debut novel, Sun Dog, was published in 2002. Since then she has worked as a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation and has held the post of Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Sussex and Chichester Universities. She lives in Kensal Rise, north-west London, where she spends most of the day in her pyjamas, writing.
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The Way Things Look To Me
Pan Macmillan
The Way Things Look To Me
Roopa Farooki
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
At 23, Asif is less than he wanted to be. His mother's sudden death forced him back home to look after his youngest sister, Yasmin, and he leads a frustrating life, ruled by her exacting need for routine. Everyone tells Asif that he's a good boy, but he isn't so sure.
Lila has escaped from home, abandoning Asif to be the sole carer of their difficult sister. Damaged by a childhood of uneven treatment, as Yasmin's needs always came first, she leads a wayward existence, drifting between jobs and men, obsessed with her looks and certain that her value is only skin deep.
And then there is Yasmin, who has no idea of the resentment she has caused. Who sees music in colour and remembers so much that sometimes her head hurts. Who doesn't feel happy, but who knows that she is special. Who has a devastating plan.
The Way Things Look To Me is an affecting, comically tender portrayal of a family in crisis, caught between duty and love in a tangled relationship both bitter and bittersweet.Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Roopa Farooki
Roopa Farooki was born in Lahore, Pakistan and brought up in London. She graduated from New College, Oxford and worked in advertising before writing fiction. Bitter Sweets, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers. She is also the author of Corner Shop and lives in south-east England and south-west France with her husband and two sons.
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The Still Point
Portobello Books
The Still Point
Amy Sackville
Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction
Amy Sackville demonstrates that she is the mistress of narrative and structure in this stunningly crafted tale of icebergs and splintering marriages.
Publisher: Portobello Books
Amy SackvilleAmy Sackville
Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and last year completed the MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and literary journals. The Still Point is her first novel.
Judges
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Daisy GoodwinDaisy Goodwin has just formed her own production company, Silver River Productions. Her credits spread across the BBC, Channel 4 and Five.
She is a Harkness scholar who attended Columbia Film School after gaining a degree in History at Cambridge University and began her TV career at the BBC as an arts producer. At Television Centre, she made films about literary figures, and devised Bookworm and The Nation's Favourite Poems Initiative. Whilst at the BBC she also devised the hugely successful shows Looking Good and Home Front.
The mother of two children, Daisy also finds time to dream up and edit poetry anthologies, including the bestseller 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life.
Daisy recently made her debut as a presenter in the BBC2 production of Essential Poems (To Fall In Love With) followed by Essential Byron and Essential Poems for Britain, which were transmitted in 2003. -
Baroness Julia Neuberger DBEJulia Babette Sarah Neuberger, Baroness Neuberger, DBE (born 27 February 1950 as Julia Schwab) is a rabbi, social reformer and member of the House of Lords, where she takes the Liberal Democrat whip.
Neuberger was Britain's second female rabbi after Jackie Tabick, and the first to have her own synagogue. She was rabbi of the South London Liberal Synagogue from 1977 to 1989 and is President of West Central Liberal Synagogue. She has been president of the Liberal Judaism movement since January 2007.
Neuberger was appointed a DBE in the New Year Honours of 2003. In June 2004 she was created a life peer as Baroness Neuberger, of Primrose Hill in the London Borough of Camden.
On 29 June 2007, Baroness Neuberger was appointed by the in-coming Prime Minister Gordon Brown as the government's champion of volunteering. Neuberger is married to Prof. Anthony Neuberger. They have two adult children, a son and a daughter -
Michèle RobertsMichèle Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her memoir Paper Houses was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in June 2007. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in 2010 in Mud - Stories of Sex and Love (Virago). Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Miranda SawyerMiranda Sawyer (born 1967) is an English journalist and broadcaster. She grew up in Wilmslow, then moved to London in 1988 to begin her career as a journalist on the magazine Smash Hits. In 1993, she became the youngest winner of the PPA Magazine Writer of the Year award for her work on Select magazine. She formerly wrote columns for Time Out (1993-96) and The Mirror (2000-3), and was a frequent contributor to Mixmag and The Face during the 1990s. She is now a feature writer for The Observer and its radio critic. Her writing appears in GQ, Vogue and The Guardian and she is a regular critic at arts shows across all media, as well as a member of the judging panel for the 2007 Turner Prize and the panel that awarded Liverpool its Capital of Culture status.
In 2004, Sawyer wrote, researched and presented an hour-long documentary for Channel 4 about the age of consent entitled, Sex Before 16: How the Law Is Failing. In 2006, she made a highly personal documentary for More 4 on abortion rights in the US, A Matter of Life and Death, as part of its Travels With My Camera strand.
She also took part in a celebrity edition of BBC 2's afternoon quiz show, The Weakest Link.
Her first book Park and Ride, a travel book on the Great British suburbs, was published by Little, Brown in 1999. She is also an occasional guest on the UK arts programme Newsnight Review on BBC2, The Culture Show (BBC 2) and also BBC Radio 2's Radcliffe and Maconie Show. She is married to Belfast born comedian Michael Smiley. -
Alexandra ShulmanAlexandra Shulman has edited British Vogue since April 1992. Famed for her cool intelligence, her skills lie in navigating a path between couture and the high street and giving readers plenty of fantasy as well as reality.
Her editorship has seen Vogue's readership rise to over a million readers thanks to collector's issues such as the Gold millennium issue and cover stars ranging from Kate Moss to Victoria Beckham - plus she is credited with fostering the photographers of the moment such as Mario Testino and Tim Walker.
She began her career at Condé Nast in 1982 - working on Tatler under legendary editor Mark Boxer and going on to become features editor of Vogue before editing GQ magazine and subsequently returning to Vogue as editor. She was awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to the magazine industry. She goes to most QPR football matches with her son
Alexandra Shulman was educated at St Paul's School, London. Her mother is journalist and author of Modern Manners, Drusilla Beyfuss, and her father was the famous theatre critic Milton Shulman. She lives in Queen's Park and occasionally cycles to work.
About the Orange Prize for Fiction 2010
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