Orange Prize Youth Panel choose their winner

On the eve of the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction awards ceremony, the six members of the Orange Prize youth panel have chosen Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton) as their overall winner.

“This is such a lovely surprise,” said Bernardine Evaristo, “and I’m absolutely delighted to receive this recognition for Blonde Roots. It’s also a great new Orange Prize initiative to embrace and encourage the readers of the future.”

The three girls and three boys, aged between 16 – 19, were recruited via teenage website, spinebreakers.co.uk, and the panel forms part of a campaign to engage younger readers with the Orange Prize.

The panel read the 20 books longlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize before meeting to choose their shortlist of six. The members have also been sharing their experiences of judging a book prize publicly online at Spinebreakers since they began reading in March.

The shortlist chosen by the youth panel was:

Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold, Tindal Street Press Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo, Hamish Hamilton The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser, Chatto & Windus A Mercy by Toni Morrison, Chatto & Windus The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight by Gina Oscher, Portobello Books The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, Faber and Faber

The group met yesterday to decide their overall winner. The meeting was facilitated by Kate Mosse, author and Honorary Director of the Orange Prize.

“The panel, and the judging process, has exceeded every expectation we had,” commented Kate Mosse. “The quality of debate was astounding and the meetings lively, vibrant, informed and respectful. It's been a privilege to eavesdrop on their deliberations.”

The youth panel members are Lily Dessau (16), Joe Kerridge (17), Clarissa Pabi (18), Rossana Duarte (18), Francis Gene-Rowe (18) and Max Elsworth (19).

Lily Dessau (16), said, “Blonde Roots is emotive, moving and thought-provoking. It has everything we were asked to look for – accessibility, originality and excellence – and more.”

Max Elsworth (19), added, “Blonde Roots has opened new literary doors for me – it’s a truly remarkable read.”

About Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of the novels-in-verse Lara, and The Emperor’s Babe and the novel with verse Soul Tourists. She co-edited the Granta/British Council annual anthology NW15 (New Writing 15) with the novelist Maggie Gee. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and the Royal Society of Literature, and has written for radio and theatre

About Blonde Roots, Hamish Hamilton

Welcome to a world turned upside down. Welcome to the word of Doris. One minute she’s playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the stinking hold of a slave ship sailing to the New World.

When she eventually arrives on a strange tropical island, Doris discovers she is, in fact, a pig-ugly savage with a brain the size of a pea, whose only purpose in life is to please her mistress. Things don’t get any better when she becomes personal assistant to the formidable Bwana, a.k.a. Chief Kaga Konata Katumba I, or when she experiences the horrors of life in the sugarcane fields, where slaves are worked to death under the blazing sun. And all the while she dreams of escape, of finding those she has loved and lost, and returning home to her motherland, England…

The official winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 will be announced tomorrow evening at an awards ceremony in The Clore Ballroom of the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, central London. This year’s judging panel includes broadcaster Fi Glover (Chair), writer and novelist Bidisha, journalist and academic Sarah Churchwell, journalist Kira Cochrane and entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox.

The Orange Prize for Fiction is the UK’s only annual book award for international fiction written by a woman. Now in its fourteenth year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world and is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman.

The 2009 winner will be presented with a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze statue known as ‘the Bessie’, created by artist Grizel Niven. Both are anonymously endowed.

Previous winners include Rose Tremain for The Road Home (2008), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006), Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005) and Andrea Levy for Small Island (2004).

For more information, go to www.orangeprize.co.uk.

ENDS

---

For more information please contact: Naomi Li at M&C Saatchi on 0207 544 3687, 07837 252 397 or naomi.li@mcsaatchi.com.

Notes to Editors

The official Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 shortlist is:

Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman, Picador
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey, Jonathan Cape
The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt, HarvillSecker
Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden, Faber and Faber
Home by Marilynne Robinson, Virago
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, Bloomsbury
About the Youth Panel The youth panel were recruited via the Spinebreakers website, the UK's only online book community for teenagers run by teenagers.

Lily Dessau, 16 Lily lives in South London and is studying Art, English, History and Maths at school. She loves reading and is also a fan of live music. Lily would like to study English Literature at University and her ambition is to become a writer or journalist. Her favourite authors include Philip Pullman, George Orwell and Malorie Blackman and she also enjoys reading murder/mystery, comedy and adventure stories.

Joe Kerridge, 17 Joe goes to school in South East London. He has loved reading since a child and cites literature and sport, particularly cricket, as his two main passions. His top five authors at the moment include Ian McEwan, Jack Kerouac, Harold Pinter, Franz Kafka and Stephen Fry.

Rossana Duarte, 18 Rossana is taking Physics, Chemistry and Biology A-levels and she hopes to go to university to study Chemistry. Her hobbies include go-karting, reading and writing poetry and astronomy and her dream is to become an astronaut. Rossana’s favourite authors include Jane Austen, Stephen Fry, Isabel Allende and F.Scott Fitzgerald.

Clarissa Pabi, 18 Clarissa is currently studying for A-levels in English Literature, Philosophy and Maths and also enjoys theatre, physics and politics. She writes for the Spinebreakers website and last year became the 2008 Roundhouse Theatre Poetry Champion. She is also part of the Barbican Young Poets. Her ambition is to become a critic and a writer and her favourite authors include Will Self, J.K Rowling and Mary Shelley.

Francis Rowe-Gene, 18 Francis is a gap year student and next year he will be going to UCL to read English. In the meantime he works as a part-time teacher and tutor. His main interests are theatre, music, film and writing and he hopes one day to work in one or more of those fields. In the past he has worked on several theatre projects both in school and out, and when he is not teaching, he can normally be found with his nose in a book.

Max Elsworth, 19 Max is currently finishing English and History A-levels at college and his ambition is to study English at Oxford. His main hobbies include reading, writing, playing the cello and guitar. An aspiring story writer, poet, song writer and journalist, Max’s top five authors are Tolkien, Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, R.L Stine and J.K. Rowling.

About Spinebreakers Spinebreakers.co.uk is a teen online book community run by teenagers themselves.

Launched in 2007, editorial control of the site is in the hands of a core editorial team of nine teenagers aged between 13 and 18 years, supported by a large network of contributing teen editors from across the UK.

The teen team produce a wide variety of multi-media content for the website including video and audio reviews, alternative book jackets and endings, soundtracks, author interviews, podcasts, blogs, short stories and much more.

**About Orange ** Orange is the key brand of the France Telecom Group, one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators. With 123 million customers, the Orange brand now covers Internet, television and mobile services in the majority of countries where the Group operates.

At the end of 2008, France Telecom had consolidated sales of 53.5 billion euros (12.7 billion euros for the first quarter of 2009) and at 29 April 2009, the Group had a customer base of almost 184 million customers in 30 countries. These include 123 million mobile customers worldwide and 13 million broadband Internet (ADSL) customers in Europe. Orange is the number three mobile operator and the number one provider of broadband Internet services in Europe and, under the brand Orange Business Services, is one of the world leaders in providing telecommunication services to multinational companies.

In the UK, Orange provides high quality GSM coverage to 99% of the UK population. At the end of March 2009, Orange had almost 17 million customers in the UK – 15.8 million active mobile customers and close to one million fixed broadband customers.

Orange and any other Orange product or service names included in this material are trade marks of Orange Personal Communications Services Limited.

For more information: www.orange.com, www.francetelecom.com, www.orange-business.com

For further information, call the Orange press office on 0870 373 1500 or email: Orangepr@golinharris.com.