LONDON – Tea Obreht was the surprise winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, receiving £30,000 and a bronze statuette after overcoming competition from Irish writer Emma Donoghue and four other novelists in the UK.
At 25, the Serbian- American writer is the youngest author to capture the award. She was honoured during a ceremony last night at London’s Royal Festival Hall for The Tiger’s Wife (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), a debut novel set in a Balkan country ravaged by war and narrated by a young physician named Natalia.
As the story opens, Natalia learns, while delivering vaccines to an orphanage, that her beloved grandfather has died in mysterious circumstances. Piecing together stories her grandfather told her as a child, Natalia is drawn into a web of fables, allegories and violent events borrowed from newspaper headlines.
The bookies’ favourite to win this year’s prize was Emma Donoghue’s Room (Picador). – (Reuters)