UK:ROSE TREMAIN, the British author, is the winner of this year's Orange Broadband prize for fiction for her novel The Road Home, concerning the plight of an east European migrant who travels to Britain in search of work.
The judges described the book as a "powerfully imagined story and a wonderful feat of emotional empathy told with great warmth and humour".
The Orange prize is awarded to the best novel written in English by a woman. The Road Home, Ms Tremain's 10th novel, tells the story of Lev, who is described as part of a vast diaspora changing British society and who needs to adapt to the "hostile streets, clannish pubs, lonely flats and obsession with celebrity" of his new country.
The book, published by Chatto Windus, was favourably reviewed on publication.
Lavinia Greenlaw, writing in the Financial Times, said the work was a "subtle and challenging account of a story we think we know already and of a person we all too often reduce to nothing more than a political issue or a statistic".
Ms Tremain, who lives in Norfolk and London, received the £30,000 (€38,000) prize in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, on London's South Bank, last night.
She has won numerous awards for her previous books, including the Whitbread Novel award and the Dylan Thomas prize. Her 1989 novel Restorationwas turned into an Oscar-winning film of the same name.
Previous winners of the Orange prize, which was established in 1996, include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun(2007), Zadie Smith for On Beauty(2006), and Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin(2005).
The Orange Broadband prize for new writers was awarded to Joanna Kavenna, who receives an Arts Council England bursary worth £10,000 for her novel Inglorious, published by Faber and Faber. - (Financial Times)