Toni Morrison Knocked Out of Orange Prize Contention

The telecommunications company Orange announced yesterday that the final six authors in the running for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction are Ellen Feldman for Scottsboro (Norton), Samantha Harvey for The Wildnerness (Cape), Samantha Hunt for The Invention of Everything Else (Houghton Mifflin), Deidre Madden for Molly Fox's Birthday (Faber), Marilynne Robinson for Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Kamila Shamsie for Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury).

Toni Morrison is among the fourteen women novelists and story writers who didn't make the shortlist. Other longlisted authors who didn't make the cut include Allegra Goodman (Intuition, Dial Press), Gina Ochsner (The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight, Portobello), Preeta Samarasan (Evening Is the Whole Day, Houghton Mifflin), Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife, Random House), Miriam Toews (The Flying Troutmans, Counterpoint), and Ann Weisgarber, an Ohio native who is still in the running for the Orange Award for New Writers. 

The winners of both awards will be announced on June 3 at a ceremony in London.