We Need to Talk About Kevin - Favourite Ever Orange Prize Winner

Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin has been selected by the public as their favourite title from the fourteen previous winners of the Orange Prize for Fiction. The poll was hosted by Waterstones.com to mark the 15th anniversary of the literary award. Shriver's novel took 26% of the public vote, narrowly ahead of Andrea Levy's Small Island, which won the prize in 2004. Jenni Murray, who chaired the Orange prize judging panel in 2005, the year Shriver won, said We Need to Talk About Kevin "resonates still, years after I read it. No other writer has [Shriver's] acerbic turn of phrase, nor the courage to examine so forensically the ambivalence felt by so many mothers." However, Shriver failed to win the Orange Prize Youth Panel award. Recruited via teen website Spinebreakers.co.uk, the shadow panel selected Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, which triumphed in 1997, as their top prize winner from the 14 previous winners.

Meanwhile American author Barbara Kingsolver has won the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction with her sixth novel The Lacuna. Daisy Goodwin, Chair of Judges, said: “We had very different tastes on the panel, but in the end we went for passion not compromise. We chose The Lacuna because it is a book of breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy.” The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities. Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Orange Prize was established in 1996 to promote women's fiction and goes to the best novel of the year written by a woman in the English language. Previous winners include Zadie Smith, Helen Dunmore, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Rose Tremain, as well as Michaels and Shriver.