Orange Broadband Prize

The 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction

Rose Tremain has won the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction this week for her novel The Road Home. The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction is open to any full length novel by a female author, written in English, published for the first time in the United Kingdom in the previous year. This years shortlisted novels were...
Fault Lines Nancy Huston
The Outcast Sadie Jones
When We Were Bad Charlotte Mendelson
Lullabies for Little Criminals Heather O'Neill
Lottery Patricia Wood

The Road Home by Rose Tremain

"On his interminable bus journey across Europe, bound for London, Lev practises his English: 'Excuse me for troubling you.' 'Do you have anything you could give me?' 'I am legal.' Lev's home country has just entered the EU and now he, like so many others, is heading west. His wife, Marina, has died of leukaemia, his five-year-old daughter, Maya, is living with her grandmother and 42-year-old Lev, a former lumberyard worker, now one of Eastern Europe's long-term unemployed, is travelling to London to find work.
Grey with exhaustion, Lev arrives in a dusty, midsummer city. Hope and envy jostle within him. As he told Lydia, his companion on the journey: 'I'm going to their country now and I'm going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck.' Things, however, do not start well: his first night in the city, spent in an Earl's Court B&B, uses up almost all his savings. On his uppers after only 24 hours, he gets a 'job' delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, for which he's paid 2p a leaflet. He sleeps on the street. Desperate, lonely and grieving, he slips into poignant, wistful dreaminess.
For a writer more accustomed to the distant past of the historical novel, the story of a modern-day economic migrant is a bold move, but Rose Tremain does not disappoint. The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia, and what might underlie the ostensibly altruistic act of moving to another country to earn money for one's family. As always, her writing has a delicious, crunchy precision: plants sold in a market are 'fledgling food'; winter is described as having a 'deep, purple cold'; new buds on larch trees are 'a pale dust, barely visible to the eye'.
Bit by bit, Lev gets himself on his feet and so begins a peripatetic, sometimes comic, often painful, journey through London, which Tremain uses to illustrate broader themes: how it really feels to be a foreigner and the rage that being dependent on others can induce. Lev is rescued from the streets by Lydia, who is now staying in the comparative paradise of Muswell Hill with Tom, an English psychotherapist, and Tom's girlfriend, Larissa, a yoga teacher from Lev and Lydia's country. Tremain handles this culture clash with adroitness and humour: sitting on Tom's lavatory, Lev relieves himself 'as quietly as he could. The idea that he was taking a shit in the flat of an English psychotherapist made him feel very mildly afraid'.
Through Lev's eyes, we see London as the incomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken, its inhabitants obsessed by status and success. As Lev's Irish landlord Christy says, with some prescience: 'Life's a feckin' football match to the Brits now. They didn't used to be like this, but now they are. If you can't get your ball in the back of the net, you're no one.' Which is pretty much how Lev, working as a kitchen porter, is made to feel. At Lydia's invitation, he goes to a concert at the Festival Hall, but is forced to flee when his new mobile phone goes off in the expectant silence just as the conductor, for whom Lydia is working, takes the podium. On another occasion, his girlfriend takes him to the opening night of a friend's feted new play, only to shame Lev for leaving the price tag on his new suede jacket.
Despite slowly improving circumstances, and the fact that he is now able to send money home, Lev's conscience tugs at him: his daughter, who has lost her mother, is now worried that her father, too, will never return, and the reader also begins to ask why he has really gone and what he is running from. For, in trying to escape the pain of grief, Lev has, ironically, inflicted an experience of terrible loss on his small daughter. All too slowly, he becomes aware of this dilemma and, as he wrestles with it, so the novel approaches its moving and satisfying climax."
The Guardian, Sunday June 10, 2007

The competition has been running since 1996 and previous winners have been...
2007 Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2006 On Beauty Zadie Smith
2005 We Need to Talk About Kevin Lionel Shriver
2004 Small Island Andrea Levy
2003 Property Valerie Martin
2002 Bel Canto Ann Canto
2001 The Idea of Perfection Kate Grenville
2000 When I Lived in Modern Times Linda Grant
1999 A Crime in the Neighbourhood Suzanne Berne
1998 Larry's Party Carol Shields
1997 Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels
1996 A Spell of Winter Helen Dunmore

Orange Broadband Award for New Writers 2008

This years winner was Joanna Kavenna for her novel Inglorious, beating off competition from The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff and The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg. Only in its fourth year, the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers aims to award emerging talent and future potential. Entries must be first works of fiction, including novels, short story collections and novellas, written by women of any age or nationality and published as a book in the UK in the previous year . Books can be entered for both the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers in any given year. Judges look for writers who demonstrate excellence, originality and accessibility.

Inglorious by Joanna Kavenna

"In her travel book The Ice Museum, which was longlisted for the Guardian first book award, Joanna Kavenna embarked on a quest to find the mythic land of Thule, a journey that led her deep into frozen wastes, both literal and imaginary. Rosa Lane, the troubled heroine of Kavenna's exuberant debut novel, has also launched herself on a journey. Her aims are lofty: to discover the meaning of existence, escape penury and gorge herself on key works of philosophy and literature - but her peregrinations don't take her much further than an ill-fated trip to the Lake District. Mostly, she wanders the corridors of her own mind instead, never far from complete collapse.
At 35, Rosa has reached "Dante's mid-point, the centre of life, when she was supposed to garner knowledge and become wise". But a faint dissatisfaction with the "pocket utopia" of her life has given way, following the death of her mother, to a sense of dislocation and disintegration. The buttresses that have so far supported her seem comically unstable, and so she sets about dismantling them. Within a matter of months she has resigned from her job as a journalist, been dumped by her handsome but vacuous boyfriend, moved out of her flat and whittled her possessions down to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the complete works of Shakespeare - all necessary preparations for a descent into the realms of depression, grief and madness.
Kavenna is astute enough to realise that there is an addictive thrill to this kind of freefall, and so Rosa keeps on tumbling, severing herself from friendships and dispensing with social norms. "Acedia, plain and simple" is her typically grandiose self-diagnosis, and the prescription is equally weighty. "Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest," she scrawls. "Hoover the living room. Clean the toilet. Distinguish the various philosophies of the way."
If Rosa has lost the plot, Kavenna has dispensed with it almost entirely, and yet this journey into a nervous breakdown is described with such relish and mordant humour that it remains as gripping as many more epic voyages. From her newly dispossessed vantage point, Rosa regards the rat race her friends are engaged in with baffled horror. Take the property ladder, "a grand illusion - everything dangling out of reach, and the ladder reaching up higher and higher to a grand crash, a Götterdämmerung of wage slaves, in which the liveried masses will fight a final battle for a small house to call their own and be slain in droves and burn to a crisp".
Such fevered musings form the bulk of the book; and a more accurate self-diagnosis would have been logorrhoea. Rosa is subject to flights of ideas and associative thinking; while her life stalls, her mind soars. The wordplay is her defence against the threat of extinction, the looming terror of "the snuffing out of me!" In exchanging the usual niceties of story and character development for this barrage of language, full of obscure allusions and quotations, Kavenna faces the charge of pomposity - worse, she risks alienating her readers with a display of linguistic dexterity that dazzles rather than engages. That she succeeds instead in captivating is testament to her sly, self-deprecating wit. It is this love of larking amid despair that saves Rosa and the novel that contains her from drowning."
The Guardian, Saturday 23 June, 2007

Previous Winners have been...
2007 The Lizard Cage Karen Connelly
2006 Disobedience Naomi Alderman
2005 26a Diana Evans