Rose Tremain's 10th novel The Road Home (Vintage) has won this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, worth £30,000 (A$62,000).

The novel is about an Eastern European migrant worker who comes to London following his wife's death, hoping to finance a better life for his daughter and mother.

Tremain, 65, was pleased that her award added to a series of literary wins for female authors in recent times, including Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize. ‘There's a lot to celebrate,' she said.

Tremain was previously shortlisted for the award in 2004 for The Colour. She dedicated the award to her editor of more than 30 years, Penny Hoare.

The chair of the judges Kirsty Lang said ‘We were all very impressed by the novel's main character and the empathy with which she has written him. We liked the cast of characters, and, though it could have been a "worthy" book, it wasn't.'

The Orange Broadband Award for New Writers went to Joanna Kavenna for Inglorious, (Faber) about a 35-year-old woman who is suddenly disoriented by a series of difficult events in her life.

The Orange prize is open to women writers for any novel published in English in the preceding year.

This article from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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