Tommy Orange won the $10,000 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for There There (Knopf). The organizers wrote, in part:
"There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It's 'masterful... white-hot... devastating' (Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard--a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. Tommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. This is the book that everyone is talking about right now, and it's destined to be a classic."
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Gwendoline Riley's novel First Love won the £1,500 (about $1,900) Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for a writer aged 40 or under, the Guardian reported. The award, which was established in memory of the founder and first chairman of Faber & Faber, is given to poetry and prose in alternate years.
Author Evie Wyld, one of this year judges, said First Love is "a book of nerve endings and often brutal truthfulness. It's slim but has a powerful gravitational field, each word placed with expert care. In its unpicking of an abusive relationship, it feels both powerfully urgent and a novel that will be studied for years for its beauty, horror and humor."