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Orange Prize Names Three to Short List for New Writers

by Zoe Strimpel
Tue, 8 Apr 2008

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The short list for the women-only Orange Broadband Award for New Writers was announced today, and the contenders are the American writer Lauren Groff, with "The Monsters of Templeton" (William Heinemann); the British author Joanna Kavenna with "Inglorious" (Faber and Faber), and the South African novelist Lauren Liebenberg with "The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam" (Virago).

Ms. Groff is from Cooperstown, N.Y., and went to Amherst College; her stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares. Her hometown is the model for Templeton, the town at the core of her novel, in which a student returns home after a catastrophic affair with her professor. The same day, a prehistoric, Loch Ness Monster-esque thing is found in the local lake, and the press descends. Meanwhile, family secrets emerge and it's shock and dislocation all round.

Ms. Kavenna's novel is her second book (evidently she is only relatively "new," though "Inglorious" is her first novel) and also has semi-autobiographical notes. It follows Rosa Lane, a successful thirtysomething journalist with the glamorous London life, the boyfriend in politics, and the great, dynamic friends. One afternoon, shortly after the death of her mother, Rosa is staring at her computer screen when suddenly the point of it all evaporates, and she walks out, thus beginning a "fall from modern grace."

"The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam" is about a couple of girls living on a remote farm in eastern Rhodesia in the 1970s, during the civil war, their childhoods a close-knit mix of African and European lore and filtered-down Catholicism. Ms. Liebenberg grew up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and, unusually, is a banker by profession in Johannesburg.

The Orange awards ceremony takes place on June 4.

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