Despite strong competition from Toni Morrison's latest novel Paradise (Chatto/Random House), A Crime in the Neighbourhood (Viking/Workman), a first novel by Washington, D.C.-born Suzanne Berne, who lives just outside Boston and writes regularly for the New York Times, has won this year's £30,000 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Awarded for the best novel of the year by a woman and published in the U.K., the prize aroused controversy this year when the shortlist of six titles included only one by a British writer, leading to claims that many current British women novelists are opting for triviality rather than the wider issues. The other shortlisted titles were The Leper's Companion by British writer Julia Blackburn (Cape/Random House), Visible Worlds by Marilyn Bowering (Flamington/HarperCollins), The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton (Doubleday/Random House) and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber/HarperCollins).
