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WORD: Marilynne Robinson wins 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction
Edited Press Release

American author Marilynne Robinson can add another major award to her growing list of accolades now that she's won the fourteenth Orange Prize for Fiction with her third novel "Home" (Virago). At an awards ceremony in London, hosted by Orange Prize for Fiction Co-Founder and Honorary Director Kate Mosse, Robinson received a £30,000 prize and the ‘Bessie,’ the award's traditional limited-edition bronze figurine.

Home is "a kind, wise, enriching novel, exquisitely crafted. We are unanimously agreed - it is a profound work of art," said Fi Glover, Chair of Judges in a press release.

The Orange Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible. The Orange Prize is awarded to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels "Housekeeping" (1981), received the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and "Gilead" (2004) which won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written two works of nonfiction, "Mother Country" and "The Death of Adam," and teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Robinson's winner novel Home is about Jack, prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames (main protagonist of Gilead, Robinson’s last novel). Gone twenty years, has returned home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child.

Jack's sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father’s old friend, John Ames.

Previous winners of the Orange Prize are Rose Tremain for "The Road Home" (2008), 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 for "Property" (2003), Ann Patchett for "Bel Canto" (2002), Kate Grenville for "The Idea of Perfection" (2001) and Linda Grant for "When I Lived in Modern Times" (2000). Helen Dunmore won the first Orange Prize back in 1996 for "A Spell of Winter."

Separately, the Orange Prize for Fiction awards ceremony also saw Francesca Kay win the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers.  Established in 2005 as part of the Orange Prize 10th year celebrations, the emphasis of the Orange Award for New Writers is on emerging talent and the evidence of future potential. Chair of Judges, Mishal Husain, presented a £10,000 bursary, provided by Arts Council England, to Kay for her novel "An Equal Stillness" (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

 

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