Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 29, took the Orange Broadband Prize for fiction for her domestic epic of the Biafra war, Half of a Yellow Sun.

Half of a Yellow Sun - Adichie’s second novel - is her homage to “the tiny debris of passionate courage”, her fellow Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s phrase for the Biafran victims of the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war. Born seven years after it ended, she lost both her grandfathers among the many thousands of civilian dead. Achebe himself has joined a chorus of praise for the novel, calling Adichie ” a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers”.

The story follows five people through the deluded hopes and terrors of Biafra, and is focused around three principal characters: an educated young woman, her houseboy, and her sister’s English lover.

Adichie’s father was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics and her mother the country’s first female registrar. Her first novel Purple Hibiscus was recognised as showing exceptional promise.

It was shortlisted for the Orange in 2004 and won the Commonwealth writers’ best first book award.

我在BBC Five Live的Simon Mayo节目上听过对她的采访和两位嘉宾对这部书的评论，评价都不错。

我为中国作家取得的成就感到高兴。郭小橹无疑是有写作功底的，但是我会忍不住这样想：“这实在不是写给我看的书”。

http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/opf/shortlists.php4

还在等待最后结果。

我也下载了几页，的确英语写法处理起来上看起来怪怪的。也许这是一个非常聪明的技巧：避免了中国人写英语小说时候的文字问题，但的确真实性就有很大问题了。

例如说到到Heathrow机场，看到了出关的时候，按照外国人和本国人分开出关，外国人是用的Alien（其实现在不是了），主人公立刻想到了好莱坞电影《Alien》（《异形》系列）。但是主人公用的英文是这样：I not understanding what people say to me at all.

说句实话，无论哪个中国人学英文，如果能知道《异形》名字是Alien，并且在Heathrow机场和“外国人”这个意思做这样的对比，就绝对不可能说出I not understanding…（大概是想模仿“我-不-理解”）这样的莫名其妙的语法错误。

我只看了四页，就基本受不了这种有些过于造作的语法，因为这种英语是不可能有人能讲出来的，初学者的语法也不可能是这样。

newlight说的词汇的问题我也同意。的确在离奇错误语法之外，她的词汇是一直很准确很丰富的。这更不可能是初学英文者的叙述了。

The longlist in full
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate)
Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan (Bloomsbury)
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk (Faber)
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)
Peripheral Vision by Patricia Ferguson (Solidus)
Over by Margaret Forster (Chatto & Windus)
The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger (Picador)
When to Walk by Rebecca Gowers (Canongate)
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo (Chatto & Windus)
The Observations by Jane Harris (Faber)
Carry Me Down by MJ Hyland (Canongate)
The Girls by Lori Lansens (Virago)
Alligator by Lisa Moore (Virago)
What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn (Tindal Street Press)
The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (Quercus)
Careless by Deborah Robertson (Sceptre)
Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert (Heinemann)
Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley (Faber)
Digging to America by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus)
The Housekeeper by Melanie Wallace (Harvill Secker)

http://books.guardian.co.uk/orange2007/story/0,,2037541,00.html