Orange Prize 2009

This year's Orange prize for the best novel written by a woman was won by a writer regarded as one of the greatest living novelists - Marilynne Robinson. Her novel Home explores the themes of family relationships and redemption. Fi Glover, chair of the judging panel said "This year's Orange Prize winner has a luminous quality to it that has drawn all of the judges to a unanimous decision. The profound nature of the writing stood out, as has the ability of writer to draw the reader into a world of hope expectation, misunderstanding, love and kindness". Robinson is the author of the novels Housekeeping (1981), chosen as one of the Observer’s 100 greatest novels of all time, and Gilead (2004) which won the Pulitzer prize. She was one of three American writers shortlisted for the £30,000 award. One of the favourites had been Ellen Feldman's Scottsboro, a fictional account of a real scandal when nine black defendants were farcically tried in Alabama in 1931 for the rape of two white girls. The other books were Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else, about the mad but brilliant inventor of AC electricity, Nikola Tesla; Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness, a first novel written about a man's descent into Alzheimer's; Deirdre Madden's Molly Fox's Birthday about a woman who never celebrates her birthday and Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows which traces the stories of three families from the nuclear detonation in Nagasaki in 1945 to post-9/11 Afghanistan.