Kingsolver in Orange

This year's Orange Prize for Fiction has gone to American author Barbara Kingsolver (left) for her sixth novel, The Lacuna, which is set between the the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover.  It  is described by Chair of Judges Daisy Godwin as :

... a book of breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy

The award ceremony invariably stirs up the debate about whether there should be a literary prize exclusively for women, and another of this year's judges, Michele Roberts in The Independent, does a valiant job of defending this space.

Postscript :

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political ... Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life. Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people. How can that not affect you politically? ... (It is) powerful craft; there's alchemy. So we have an obligation to take it seriously – and I do. Perhaps that's why I'm marked. I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

Kingsolver talks about her life in writing to Maya Jaggi in The Guardian.