Prize fight: Booker and Orange winners battle it out in competition for best novel of the year
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.The most recent winner of the Orange Prize for women's fiction is pitted against the Man Booker victor in a rare head-to-head of literary honours in this year's Whitbread book awards.
The most recent winner of the Orange Prize for women's fiction is pitted against the Man Booker victor in a rare head-to-head of literary honours in this year's Whitbread book awards.
The Whitbread, which has five categories whose winners then compete for the £30,000 top prize, sees Andrea Levy's Small Island, which won the Orange, shortlisted for best novel against Alan Hollinghurst, who took the Booker cheque last month with The Line of Beauty. This is the first time this has happened.
They face competition from Kate Atkinson, a former winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year, with her crime story Case Histories. Louis de Bernières, whose novel Birds Without Wings was largely panned by the critics and ignored by the Booker jury, is the fourth contender in the category.
Toby Bourne, a book buyer for Asda and one of the judges for the novel award, said that all were good stories, although he admitted that only Hollinghurst was stocked in his stores - and that only since the Booker win. "It's a great book and wonderfully written but it's not a natural Asda title," he said.
Andrea Levy, who has just been on a literary festival tour in Canada with Hollinghurst, said it was fantastic to be shortlisted. "And the nice thing about the Whitbread is it's about being up with the boys as well. With the Orange, people say, 'it's a girls' book'," she said.
"It's always worth having a prize because every time you're shortlisted more people get to hear about the book and hopefully more people buy it. This is a very nice list - it's two women and two men, which is nice."
Whoever wins the novel category will face competition from the winners of the first novel, biography, poetry and children's book awards for the overall title.
Three of the four first novel contenders are graduates of writing courses, with two having studied at the University of East Anglia and one with the Arvon Foundation.
Susanna Clarke, whose debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was a much-talked-about inclusion on the Booker long-list, faces rivals including Panos Karnezis, a Greek writer. Karnezis tackles the same period of early 20th century history in Greece and Turkey in his book The Maze as de Bernières does in Birds Without Wings.
Journalists and academics dominate the biography category, where the stories of two writers, Stephen Spender and V S Pritchett, will vie with a biography of Mary Queen of Scots and the life of Jabez, a 19th-century fraudster.
The big-hitter in the poetry category is the Oxford academic John Fuller, with his 15th collection of poetry. His rivals are young talents in their early thirties, two of whom - Leontia Flynn and Matthew Hollis - are shortlisted for their debut books. Hollis, who is an editor at Faber & Faber publishers, has been particularly praised for his collection Ground Water.
The final category, children's books, used to be the Cinderella of publishing but thanks to the success of Harry Potter is one of the most fiercely fought sections in the awards. There were 113 entries this year including How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, a story of a child's family torn apart by an unspecified war.
The Whitbread Book of the Year winner will be announced on 25 January. Category winners each receive £5,000.
THE NOMINATIONS
BEST NOVEL
Kate Atkinson: Case Histories (Doubleday)
Louis de Bernières: Birds Without Wings (Secker and Warburg)
Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty (Picador)
Andrea Levy: Small Island (Headline)
FIRST NOVEL
Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury)
Richard Collins: The Land as Viewed from the Sea (Seren Books)
Susan Fletcher: Eve Green (Fourth Estate)
Panos Karnezis: The Maze (Jonathan Cape)
BIOGRAPHY
John Guy: My Heart is my Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Fourth Estate)
David McKie Jabez: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Rogue (Atlantic Books)
John Sutherland: Stephen Spender (Viking)
Jeremy Treglown: V S Pritchett: A Life (Chatto & Windus)
CHILDREN'S BOOK
Anne Cassidy: Looking for JJ (Scholastic Children's Books)
Geraldine McCaughrean: Not the End of the World (Oxford University Press)
Meg Rosoff: How I Live Now (Puffin Books)
Ann Turnbull: No Shame, No Fear (Walker Books)
POETRY
Leontia Flynn: These Days (Jonathan Cape)
John Fuller: Ghosts (Chatto & Windus )
Matthew Hollis: Ground Water (Bloodaxe Books)
Michael Symmons: Roberts Corpus (Jonathan Cape)
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments