An epic rendering of the brutal civil war in Nigeria involving the breakaway by Biafra clinched the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in London last night.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had been the favourite to take the award with her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun. At 30, she is younger than Zadie Smith, who won last year with On Beauty when the leading women’s fiction prize was still known as the Orange Prize.

Half of a Yellow Sun is already a bestseller thanks to its inclusion on the Richard & Judy book club reading list, the surest route to success in modern British publishing.

Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2006, was among the shortlisted titles beaten yesterday. The others were Arlington Park, by Rachel Cusk, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, by Xiaolu Guo, The Observations, by Jane Harris, and Digging to America,by Anne Tyler.

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• Pictures: Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007

The consolations of civil war

Helen Dunmore reviews Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A nation's memory

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

BACKGROUND

• Review: Fiction: Purple Hisbiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• Hugo Barnacle reviews Half of a Yellow Sun

Kate Mosse, the honorary director of the award, and Muriel Gray, the 2007 chair of judges, presented Adichie with the £30,000 prize and a “Bessie”, a limited-edition bronze figurine, at the newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London.

Gray said: “The judges and I were hugely impressed by the power, ambition and skill of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel. It’s astonishing, not just in the skilful subject matter, but in the brilliance of its accessibility. This is a moving and important book by an incredibly exciting author.”

Half of a Yellow Sun is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of the vicious secessionist conflict.

Biafra declared itself independent on May 30, 1967, seven years after colonial rule ended in Nigeria. The new state was a response to political turbulence, coups and pogroms against the Ibo, Nigeria’s third-largest ethnic group, but it lacked the resources to survive. It was a net importer of food, had little industry and lost control of its oilfields in the war. More than one million of its civilian population are thought to have died as a result of malnutrition and thousands more were killed in the fighting before Biafra surrendered on January 15, 1970.

In Adichie’s novel, three characters are swept up in these rapidly unfolding events. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, is employed as a servant for a university lecturer. Olanna, a young, middle-class woman, has come to live with the professor, abandoning her privileged life in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charismatic idealism of her new lover. Richard is a tall, shy Englishman, in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister Kainene, who refuses to belong to anyone.

They are propelled into events that pull them apart and bring them together in the most unexpected ways. As Nigerian troops advance and they run for their lives, their ideals – and their loyalties to each other – are severely tested.

Rodney Troubridge, the fiction specialist at Waterstone’s booksellers, said: “We are delighted that a novel set in Africa and with such important and relevant things to say about our ability to initiate and survive the horrors of war has won.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

–– Born in Nigeria on September 15, 1977

–– Originally from Abba, in Anambra state, she grew up in the university town of Nsukka, where her father was professor of statistics

–– Studied communication at Drexel University, Philadelphia, and communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University. Completed a masters degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

–– Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004 and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction

Source: The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie website

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