NELLY - NIGERIAN AUTHOR TRIUMPHS IN ORANGE PRIZE

NIGERIAN AUTHOR TRIUMPHS IN ORANGE PRIZE

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won the Orange Broadband prize for fiction for her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun.

The 29-year-old beat off competition from Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss to triumph at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank and win the top prize worth £30,000.

If Desai had won she would have become the first author to be victorious in both the exclusively-female Orange Broadband prize for fiction and the Man Booker prize.

Set during the Biafran war of the late 1960s, Half of a Yellow Sun deals with a triangle of characters whose lives are torn apart and ethnic and class loyalties tested as the advance of Nigerian troops heralds the end of colonialism in west Africa.

More than three million people died in the secessionist conflict and thousands were massacred.

Adichie's debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, was also shortlisted for last year's Orange Broadband prize for fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker prize.

At tonight's ceremony, Karen Connelly won the £10,000 new writer's award for The Lizard Cage.