The six women authors battling it out for a £30,000 literary prize.
Launched in 1996, The Orange Prize for Fiction celebrates the work of female authors from across the globe, bestowing literary glory (and a cheque for £30,000) upon the writer par excellence according to a panel of experts chaired by Bettany Hughes. Zadie Smith and Lionel Shriver are among the past winners of the award, while this year's shortlist - revealed today - includes Emma Donoghue and Nicole Krauss.
Emma Donoghue - Room (Picador)
The Irish-born novelist, who now lives in Canada, has pedigree in tackling difficult subject matter and picking up literary awards in the process. Although married with two children, her treatment of lesbian themes saw her win the 1997 Stonewall Book Award (formerly the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award for Literature) for Hood (1995) and be named joint winner of the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction for The Sealed Letter (2008). Her 7th novel, Room, depicts a young boy and his mother who are held captive in an 11 feet by 11 feet room by "Old Nick", loosely based on the on the Josef Fritzl saga. To date it has been shortlisted for a dozen awards and honours, including the Man Booker Prize.
Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury)
Half-Scottish and half-Sierra Leonian, Aminatta Forna has used the experiences of her formative years in the politically volatile Sierra Leone to shape her writing. Her 2003 writing debut, The Devil that Danced on Water, was a memoir which examined the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of her father, and came runner-up in the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-Fiction. Her latest book, The Memory Of Love, follows Adrian Lockheart, a psychologist who arrives to practise in Freetown in the wake of civil war.
Emma Henderson - Grace Williams Says it Loud (Sceptre)
Having worked as a teacher in London comprehensive schools for over a decade, and spent several years spent running a ski and snowboard lodge in the Alps, Emma Henderson returned to London in 2005, aged 47, to begin a career as a novelist. Her debut book, Grace Williams Says It Loud, tells the story of Grace, an 11-year-old girl who strikes up a friendship with a fellow patient at the mental institution in which they are kept. Also shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, the book draws upon Henderson's experience of her own sister, Clare, who was sent to a similar institution in 1957.
Nicole Krauss - Great House (Viking)
Still only in her mid-thirties and on her third novel, New York author Nicole Krauss has already created quite a stir within literary circles. Her second novel, The History of Love (2005), became an international bestseller, garnering widespread praise and nominations for the Medicis, Femina and Orange Prizes. She was later named by The New Yorker on its "20 under 40" list of prestigious writers. Great House follows the travails of protagonists in London, Jerusalem and New York, and their involvement with a "desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away".
Téa Obreht - The Tiger’s Wife (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
At 25, Serbian Téa Obreht is the youngest of this year's shortlisted authors. Born in Belgrade, she left Yugoslavia under the shadow of war aged seven with her mother and grandparents, later spending time in Cyprus and Egypt before settling in the United States. Following acclaimed short stories The Laugh and The Sentry, she was also named in The New Yorker's "20 under 40". Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, concerns Natalia, a young doctor working a conflict-ravaged Balkan country who learns that her grandfather has died. According to Obreht, "It's a saga about doctors and their relationships to death throughout all these wars in the Balkans".
Kathleen Winter - Annabel (Jonathan Cape)
The final debutant novelist on this year's shortlist started her career as a script writer on US kids' TV program Sesame Street. Since the mid-2000s she has been focussing on fiction; her short story collection boYs (2007) won the Winterset Award, while Annabel was the only novel to make the Scotiobank Giller Prize, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and 2010 Governor General's Awards shortlists in her native Canada in 2010.Annabel deals with the tumultuous emotional and physical demands placed on Wayne, born neither a girl or a boy but raised as the latter, and his relationship with Annabel, his "shadow-self".
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