INVERNESS-born Ali Smith yesterday became the first person to have a novel shortlisted for all three of Britain's biggest literary awards.
The Accidental, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year and in January won the Whitbread Novel of the Year, was yesterday named as one of the six novels in contention for this year's Orange Prize.
As with the Man Booker Prize, it
is joined on the Orange shortlist by Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Two other British authors - Hilary Mantel with Beyond Black and Sarah Waters with The Night Watch - and two novels by foreign writers - American Nicole Krauss's The History of Love and Australian Carrie Tiffany's debut novel Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living - complete the line-up.
The Orange Prize, which was set up to highlight the variety and range of women's writing throughout the world, this year underlines the particular strength of British women's writing.
While in the last five years the £30,000 award has only once gone to home-grown winner - Andrea Levy's Small Island in 2004 - this year's shortlist is dominated by an impressive crop of British women writers.
It contains the dazzling linguistic inventiveness of The Accidental, which illuminates a seemingly ordinary plot about a visiting stranger shattering the lives of a middle-class academic's family on holiday in Norfolk by effortlessly telling the story from inside their imaginations.
On Beauty also has middle-class academics and their families as its subject, but its pin-sharp observation of a whole variety of classes and races on and off a New England campus pushes this comedy of manners to rarefied heights.
In Beyond Black Mantel tells the story of a medium who really can see tortured souls beyond death's shadows.
Waters' The Night Watch conveys the drabness of post-war Britain and the explosive intimacies that had preceded it in wartime.
"When you look at all these novels you can see that they represents the incredible wealth of women's writing talent," said Kate Mosse, the best-selling author of Labyrinth who founded the prize in 1996. The winner will be announced on 6 June.
The full article contains 380 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
