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Doctor turned writer makes Orange longlist
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent18 Mar 2009
A London writer who was a junior doctor before quitting for comedy has made the longlist for the £30,000 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Lissa Evans, 48, joins Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison on the 20-strong list for the book award which celebrates fiction written by women. Evans, who has worked as a producer on such TV shows as Father Ted and The Kumars since leaving the NHS, has been nominated for Their Finest Hour And A Half about the efforts to make a morale-boosting film in wartime London with actors who are jaded and utterly unsuitable.
Three other London authors have been nominated for the award which is in its 14th year.
Bernadine Evaristo is down for her fourth novel Blonde Roots, a satirical take on Britain's involvement in the slave trade.
Laura Fish, 44, is nominated for Strange Music which interweaves the life of the ailing poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1837 with that of a Creole maid in Jamaica.
Kamile Shamsie, 35, a Pakistani novelist who splits her time between London and Karachi, is listed for Burnt Shadows, a continent-crossing story which spans half a century and ties a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay to a Japanese family hit by the atomic bomb in 1945.
This year's judging panel is chaired by broadcaster Fi Glover and four of the longlisted writers have been longlisted before - Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Curtis Sittenfeld and Deirdre Madden - and six are debut novels.
The winner will be announced on 3 June.
