Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna won the £30,000 (US$43,732) Orange Prize for fiction by women, beating a strong shortlist that included Hilary Mantel and Lorrie Moore. The Guardian reported that chair of judges Daisy Goodwin praised the book's "breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy," adding that for the judging panel the contest was primarily between these three authors among of the six finalists.
"It was a bit like trying to choose between your three beloved children," she said. "In the end I suppose that while a couple of us felt very passionately about The Lacuna everyone was happy for it to be named winner. They were three of the finest books I've read in a long time. It wasn't like we were scraping in any sense."
Irene Sabatini's The Boy Next Door won the Orange award for new writers, and Anna Lewis won the short story competition for unpublished writers.
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Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin was voted the U.K.'s favorite Orange prize winner ever. In a readers' poll hosted by Waterstones.com, the novel garnered 26% of the public vote to narrowly edge Andrea Levy's Small Island, the Guardian reported.
"OK, it's official," said Shriver. "Kevin no longer belongs to me, but to you lot. While I am abashed at this honor, Kevin himself is smugly self-satisfied. Think of all the attention that one school mass murder has earned that guy."
Shriver was something of a reluctant winner, however, telling the Independent there may be too many awards now. "I'm critical of the Orange people on this front," she said. "The more prizes you give, the more meaningless they become. It's a stupid thing to have more than one winner; it's diluting and it means nobody wins."
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One thing Orange Prize winners do seem to have going for them is sales performance. The Bookseller reported that in the U.K., bestselling Orange Prize winners have outsold bestselling winners of the Booker prize. According to Nielsen BookScan sales figures, the top-selling Orange winner of all time is Andrea Levy's Small Island (834,958), followed by Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (646,373) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (525,438). Among Booker Prize winners, Yann Martel's Life of Pi leads everyone with more than a million copies sold, but the sales drop-off is substantial to Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger in second place (512,093) and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (439,601) in third compared with Orange winners.
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The German Publishers and Booksellers Association named Israeli author David Grossman winner of the 2010 Peace Prize in honor of his support for reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians, the Associated Press reported. Grossman will receive the $30,200 prize October 10 during the Frankfurt Book Fair. The association praised Grossman for always attempting, in works like his novel To the End of the Land, to "understand and describe the position of the other."
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Spain's 2010 Prince of Asturias Award for literature was given to Lebanese-born French writer Amin Maalouf "for his exploration of Mediterranean culture 'as a symbolic space of coexistence and tolerance,'" the Associated Press reported. Maalouf's books--which include Samarkand, Leo the African and The Gardens of Light--have been translated into more than 20 languages. He will receive €50,000 ($70,000) and a sculpture by artist Joan Miro.