American author Lionel Shriver on Tuesday won the Orange Prize for Fiction, one of the most prestigious awards for female novelists in English, for a story about a teenage mass murderer, Reuters reported. "We Need to Talk About Kevin" charts the progress of Kevin Katchadourian through the eyes of his mother, who despises him and suspects he was born evil. In the book Katchadourian kills seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher, shortly before his sixteenth birthday. He is visited in prison by his mother, Eva, who narrates in a series of letters to her estranged husband Franklin the story of Kevin's upbringing. "We Need To Talk About Kevin" was Shriver's seventh novel. With wicked satire of suburbia and an unflinchingly grim look at parenthood, "Kevin" became a lightning rod for debate and a word-of-mouth hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The work was published by Serpent's Tail Publishing, a small outfit which has been causing a buzz in the literary world for its ability to sign critically acclaimed writers such as Shriver and Joolz Denby, who was shortlisted for the Orange prize for her murder story "Billie Morgan". Shriver also beat off competition from Jane Garden's "Old Faith" which had been tipped as a favourite to win. The novel charts the reminiscences of an old lawyer growing up in the twilight years of the British Raj. Other shortlisted authors were Sheri Holman for "The Mammoth Cheese" Marina Lewycka's "A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian" and Maile Meloy's "Liars and Saints". The 30,000 pounds ($54,930) prize was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction by women who write in English. --SP 2353 Local Time 2053 GMT
