NEWS FLASH: Esi Edugyan in the Running for the Orange Prize

Photo: Chad Hipolito for The Globe and Mail

"Canadian author Esi Edugyan is among six finalists for Britain's Orange Prize for fiction by women. Ms. Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues, a Booker Prize finalist [and Giller winner] has been shortlisted for the prestigious award. Three American novelists are also among the six finalists.
     Organizers on Tuesday announced a shortlist that includes Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies, Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and Madeleine Miller's debut The Song of Achilles."
— The Associated Press (via The Globe and Mail)
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"Former Orange prize winner Ann Patchett is in the running for the award once more. She was shortlisted alongside novels exploring subjects from adultery to ancient Greek love to wartime atrocities in Romania.
     Six novelists were named as contenders for the 17th annual award of a prize dedicated to excellence in fiction written by women.
     Three American writers were named: Patchett, Madeline Miller and Cynthia Ozick, who, at 84, is the oldest writer to have been shortlisted. There was one Briton, Georgina Harding, an Irish writer, Anne Enright, and the Canadian Esi Edugyan."
— Mark Brown, The Guardian
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Heaven and Hell in the Same Breath

From: Forum Ksiazki

"When she [Cynthia Ozick] sits down to write she has to force herself into it. 'And I mean forcing it – without any hope that anything will come out of it. Because if I don't start, I won't get going. And sometimes starting is so difficult. Because it's all chaos. It's the difference between writing an essay, which if it's about Henry James, at least you know that much. But with fiction you don't. It could be a scene in your mind or it could be some kind of tendril that you can barely define. So I have to force it. And then after – and this is real compulsion, real self-flagellation – it kind of takes off. But there's a lot of agony before. And sometimes during. And sometimes all through. But just before the end and revelations start coming, that's the joy. But mostly its hell.'"— Emma Brockes, Guardian
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