Good news, bad news

One of my favorite 2012 novels  - THE SONG OF ACHILLES by Madeline Miller - has just won the Orange Prize, a UK literary award for the best book written by a woman in English in a given year. A reinterpretation of the Iliad, THE SONG OF ACHILLES provides a fresh and emotionally enthralling perspective on the well-known story, and I am very glad that it is getting the recognition it deserves.

So that's the good news.  Here's the bad news.  The Orange Prize, "celebrating excellence, originality, and accessibility in women's fiction" around the world, has lost its sponsorship after 17 years.  That may not bother some people, who wonder about the legitimacy of a prize that champions the work of one gender by excluding the work of the other. (Interested in a discussion of the award's validity? See these articles by Joanna Trollope, chair of this year's judging panel; Cynthia Ozick, one of this year's nominees; and British critic Matthew Cain.)

But if one looks at the Orange Prize simply from the perspective of an avid reader, there's no question that it has achieved great success in identifying books worth reading. It wasn't until this year that I discovered the annual Orange longlist. Looking back over the 17 years of the award, I see in these twenty-title longlists an outstanding resource for book groups, who are typically looking for novels that offer both meat (literary substance) and drink (readability), and that's what these lists provide. Click here for the lists, divided into the long and short nomination categories.

For the sake of good reading, let's hope the prize continues!

Mary Hoskinson-Dean