Surprise winner for UK's Orange Prize

At age 25, Tea Obreht is now the youngest person ever to win the UK's coveted Orange Prize for fiction. Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, was received across the English-speaking world to great critical acclaim and has now achieved yet another distinction with one of the UK's highest literary honors, which also comes with prize money in the amount of £30,000. The book is set in the Balkans just after their civil war, and is partly inspired by Obreht's own personal history: born in the former Yugoslavia, Obreht emigrated to the United States at the age of 12. Other books in consideration for this prestigious award included Emma Donoghue's Room, The Great House by Nicole Krauss, Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love, and Annabel by Kathleen Winter, all of which are available through your Community Library. Click here to read the full report on this year's Orange Prize from The Guardian.

Memory of Love wins Commonwealth Writer's Prize

Congratulations to author Aminatta Forna, who recently won the £10,000 (US$16,233) Commonwealth Writer's Prize for her novel Memory of Love. In the book, a gifted young surgeon is haunted by memories of the civil war that has decimated his Sierra Leone home; meanwhile, a patient relates disturbing stories about the post-colonial years and a well-intentioned British psychologist draws all of them into the path of an enigmatic woman. Other books that were recognized by the awards committee include Room by Canadian author Emma Donoghue, in which an abused five-year-old boy narrates the story of his life growing up in a single room, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by UK author David Mitchell, a work set in 1799 Japan telling the story of an ambitious clerk for the Dutch East Indies Company who has only five years to amass enough money to marry his sweetheart back home.