Marilynne Robinson wins 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction

19.15pm, London, 3 June 2009: American author Marilynne Robinson has won the fourteenth Orange Prize for Fiction with her third novel Home (Virago). 

At an awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, hosted by Orange Prize for Fiction Co-Founder and Honorary Director, Kate Mosse, the 2009 Chair of Judges, Fi Glover, presented the author with the £30,000 prize and the ‘Bessie’, a limited edition bronze figurine.  Both are anonymously endowed.

Fi Glover, Chair of Judges, said: 'A kind, wise, enriching novel, exquisitely crafted.  We were unanimously agreed – it is a profound work of art.'

Marilynne Robinson
is the author of the novels Housekeeping (1981), chosen as one of the Observer’s 100 greatest novels of all time, received the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and Gilead (2004) which won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written two works of non-fiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam, and teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Home
Jack – prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames (main protagonist of Gilead, Robinson’s last novel), gone twenty years, has returned home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child.

His sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father’s old friend, John Ames.