It isn’t surprising that a world living under the current American administration should find great meaning in fiction about war and bare life.

Karen Connelly has won the Orange Prize For New Writers for The Lizard Cage. (Thanks, Lorna)

Read what the NYTBR had to say about the novel:

Amoebic dysentery, maggots, sadistic guards, a reeking latrine pail — these are the constants in Karen Connelly’s tale of political prisoners in Burma, a novel that, at least initially, makes you wonder who will read on, through scenes featuring little more than truncheons and gruel, to puzzle over the unexpected, alien detail — a white pen — at the center of the plot. And who will care about the novel’s main characters, a 12-year-old orphan who kills rats for a living and a skeletal dissident in solitary confinement, reduced to eating the lizards he traps inside his cell?

Yet so consummate is Connelly’s skill in “The Lizard Cage” that such elements compel us to keep turning the pages. Although this is the award-winning Canadian poet and travel writer’s first novel, her writing is muscular and taut, bringing inmates and warders fully alive. Still more impressive, she avoids anything so trite as an affirmation of the human spirit in the face of injustice.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won the main Orange Prize for fiction for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Here is the writer in an interview:

I wrote this novel because I wanted to write about love and war, because I grew up in the shadow of Biafra, because I lost both grandfathers in the Nigeria-Biafra war, because I wanted to engage with my history in order to make sense of my present, many of the issues that led to the war remain unresolved in Nigeria today, because my father has tears in his eyes when he speaks of losing his father, because my mother still cannot speak at length about losing her father in a refugee camp, because the brutal bequests of colonialism make me angry, because the thought of the egos and indifference of men leading to the unnecessary deaths of men and women and children enrages me, because I don’t ever want to forget. I have always known that I would write a novel about Biafra. At 16, I wrote an awfully melodramatic play called For Love of Biafra. Years later, I wrote short stories, That Harmattan Morning, Half of a Yellow Sun and Ghosts, all dealing with the war. I felt that I had to approach the subject with little steps, paint on a smaller canvas first, before starting the novel.

And also read this

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I’ve always discussed the writing process on my blog, which I’ve had for some years now. Actually, I did wind up pulling back from it because there’s a level on which you… not exactly put too much effort into it, but find that you’re using in the blog raw proto-material that may eventually melt down into a story, and that’s not helpful.

The biggest way my writing habits have changed over the years is I’m no longer nocturnal. In the old days, I would tend to write when everything else that could be done had been done. I’d start around 8pm and work industriously until around 5am. Then, somewhere in the early ’90s, I gave up smoking and that made a difference. Without cigarettes, if I tried doing that I just fell asleep at the keyboard with nothing to show for my efforts but 500 pages of the letter ‘M’. At that stage, I became more diurnal. I think it was having kids; getting older, too.

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