BRITAIN: Two of the big hitters who have so far lost out in the current book prize season were yesterday given a final chance of a victory. The formidable duo of Smiths - Zadie and Ali - are eminent among 20 names on the longlist for the woman-only £30,000 (€43,700) Orange prize for fiction.
Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty and Ali Smith's The Accidental live to fight another day against authors such as Helen Dunmore, the first Orange winner 10 years ago, Sarah Waters, Hilary Mantel, Jill Dawson and Philippa Gregory.
Since any English-language woman author in the world can enter the Orange, they are also up against seven Americans, an Australian and a Tahitian. The Tahitian, Celestine Hitiura Vaite, improved her English in youth by reading women's magazines.
Both Smiths made the Man Booker award shortlist. But Zadie was excluded even from the preliminary Whitbread fiction shortlist. Last month On Beauty went on to win the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth prize, beating novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby. The judges described On Beauty, a study of two British-American academic families plotted with a debt to EM Forster's Howards End, as "written on such a high level of style and intelligence that it gleams".
Ali Smith (43) emerged as a big hitter this season when The Accidental, about a woman who creates fruitful mayhem in the lives of a British family on holiday, reached both the Booker and Whitbread shortlists.
Remarkably, both books are only third novels. Zadie (30) got her big break when her exuberant first novel, White Teeth, was shortlisted for the Orange in 2000, Ali when her second, Hotel World, was shortlisted in 2001.
Yesterday the Orange's honorary director, Kate Mosse, said: "What is amazing is that authors are making this big impression on the world of fiction with only their third or fourth novels." Among the dark horses on the longlist is Sarah Waters's fervently reviewed fourth novel, The Night Watch, about women in the second World War.
Notably missing from the list is one title that has already sold half a million copies and topped the UK bestseller list for all books for four weeks in a row - a feat unequalled by any prize novel in recent years. It is Labyrinth, Kate Mosse's own third novel. "I am ineligible to enter as an employee of the prize," she said when asked about its absence. "It would be utterly inappropriate." The list includes two big historical novels, Dunmore's House of Orphans, about Finnish resistance to Czarist Russia, and Gregory's The Constant Princess, set during Katherine of Aragon's short reign as queen to King Henry VIII.
Tips for the shortlist, to be announced on April 19th, from Waterstone's fiction buyer Rodney Troubridge yesterday included On Beauty, The Accidental, The Night Watch and Mantel's Beyond Black.