US novelist A.M. Homes wins Women’s Prize for Fiction, edging out bookmaker favourite Mantel

LONDON – American novelist A.M. Homes has won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction with her sixth novel “May We Be Forgiven.”

Homes beat award winning writer Hilary Mantel and three other finalists for the 30,000-pound ($45,000) prize — previously known as the Orange Prize, one of Britain’s most prestigious literary awards.

On Wednesday, actress Miranda Richardson, who chaired a panel of judges, praised Home’s novel, a story about two brothers, as a “dazzling, original, viscerally funny black comedy” and a “subversion of the American dream.”

It defeated Mantel’s Tudor saga “Bring Up the Bodies,” a bookmaker’s favourite; Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior”; Zadie Smith’s “NW”; and Marie Semple’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?”

The award, in its 18th year, celebrates writing by women in English from around the world.