Orange Prize winner: Marilynne Robinson’s Home

The author Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home was the winner of this year’s prize. Marilynne Robinson was presented with the award by Fi Glover, a BBC presenter, at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

The judges Fi Glover, Kira Cochrane, Guardian journalist, Sarah Churchwell, academic, Bidisha, writer, and internet entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox unanimously selected the book from the short list.

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Overview of Novel

Home is a follow up to Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer prize winner Gilead, written five years. Both are set in the town of Gilead, in the US state of Iowa. This story is based around the household of Reverend Robert Boughton.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother Jack, the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years, comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Overview of Gilead

An intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America’s heart. Writing in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful, spare, and spiritual prose allows “even the faithless reader to feel the possibility of transcendent order” (Slate). In the luminous and unforgettable voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, Gilead reveals the human condition and the often unbearable beauty of an ordinary life.

The Orange Prize

The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction is one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary prizes, awarded annually for the best original full-length novel by a female author of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK in the preceding year since 1996.

The winner of the prize receives £30,000, along with a bronze sculpture called the “Bessie” created by artist Grizel Niven, the sister of actor/writer David Niven.

Winners

2009: Marilynne Robinson – Home
2008: Rose Tremain – The Road Home
2007: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Half of a Yellow Sun
2006: Zadie Smith – On Beauty
2005: Lionel Shriver – We Need to Talk About Kevin
2004: Andrea Levy – Small Island
2003: Valerie Martin – Property
2002: Ann Patchett – Bel Canto
2001: Kate Grenville – The Idea of Perfection
2000: Linda Grant – When I Lived in Modern Times
1999: Suzanne Berne – A Crime in the Neighborhood
1998: Carol Shields – Larry’s Party
1997: Anne Michaels – Fugitive Pieces
1996: Helen Dunmore – A Spell of Winter