The £30 000, 00 worth Orange Broadbent Prize for Fiction is a UK based annual award that honours the best fiction of the year written by a woman in the English language. It celebrates its fifteenth anniversary on June 7 this year. It was co-founded by Kate Mosse in 1995. The first prize was given the following year.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Orange Prize in 2007 with her second novel, Half of A Yellow Sun, set in the Biafran war. The epic novel sold 650 000 copies in Britain alone and is now a set literature text in Ireland.
Best of Orange Best 2010
The Best of Orange Best prize winner will be chosen from the fourteen previous award winners
A short list was compiled by a panel of six teenagers who were selected from entries sent to Spinebreakers, the online community for book loving teenagers. They read the fourteen previous winning titles and came up with a shortlist of six from which one winner, the ‘Best of the Orange Best 2010,’ will be selected.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is in fine literary company indeed and faces competition from inaugural winner Helen Dunmore who won the 1996 prize with her novel, A Spell of Winter; in addition to the following illustrious authors; Linda Grant, When I lived in Modern Times, Andrea Levy, Small Island; Ann Michaels, Fugitive Pieces; Zadie Smith, On Beauty.
The Orange Prize Youth Panel shortlist was announced on 29 April. The winner will be announced on June 7, two days ahead of the award ceremony for Orange Prize 2010.
The Best of Orange 10th Anniversary prize went to Andrea Levy’s Small Island in 2005, which won the prize in 2004. Ironically, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 's debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, lost out to Small Island when it reached the shortlist in 2004.
About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Purpel Hibiscus is not short of awards, however. It won the 2005 Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book. It was published in 2003. Her third book is a collection of twelve stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, which was published to great critical acclaim in 2009.
The author studied medicine and pharmacology in Nigeria, but left the country for the United States at the age of nineteen. She studied humanities at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
In 2003 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie completed a Master’s degree in creative writing at John Hopkins University in Baltimore and also holds a Master of Arts in African Studies from Yale. She is currently a recipient of a MacArthur scholarship. She currently lives in the United States.
Farai Muchemwa - I am medically qualified and worked as a general practioner in Zimbabwe for five years. I have an uncompleted Master of Public Health ...
