Barbara Kingsolver wins the 2010 Orange Prize

Barbara Kingsolver

In March Trisha posted about the Orange Prize longlist, and the results are finally in—Barbara Kingsolver it is, for her novel The Lacuna!

(The Orange Prize is a British award given to the best novel written by a woman in English and published in the UK in a given year.)

Daisy Goodwin, chair of judges, commented on the prize selection: “We chose The Lacuna because it is a book of breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy.”

For more on The Lacuna, read this excerpt from BookPage’s November interview with Kingsolver:

It’s the epic story of Harrison William Shepherd, a young boy whose Mexican mother takes him back to her home country in the 1930s after splitting with his father, a Washington, D.C., bureaucrat … The novel is a brilliant mix of truth and fiction, history and imagination, presented as a compilation of Harrison’s journals, along with newspaper clippings and other notes that make for a compelling and utterly believable read … For Kingsolver, this book was her exploration of that “in between” space where ­pieces are missing and the truth is hidden. She also set out to probe the question:

Do artists have a responsibility to address social issues and express their opinions?

Continue reading this interview.

Kingsolver was up against some stiff competition: Lorrie Moore, Hilary Mantel . . . Do you agree that The Lacuna was the best novel written by a woman (and published in the UK) this year?