Two Canadian writers were among the winners honoured at the Orange Broadband Prize gala in London on Wednesday.

Karen Connelly won the Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers for her novel The Lizard Cage, which tells the story of a musician who serves a 20-year solitary confinement sentence in a Burmese prison after being discovered singing protest songs.

Writer Karen Connelly poses for photographers in central London, Wednesday June 6, 2007 after she won the Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
AP

The annual English-language prize carries a value of £10,000 (about $21,000 Cdn). It honours debut fiction works by female authors from anywhere in the world, but published in the U.K.

The chair of the judging panel, poet and novelist Jackie Kay, praised the Calgary-born, Toronto-based writer's book.

The Lizard Cage is an "extraordinary, lyrical, compelling book," Kay said at the Royal Festival Hall gala on Wednesday.

"Despite its grim subject matter, we found it uplifting and ultimately optimistic. We were blown away by it."

Connelly, a frequent traveller to Asia and Greece whose writing extends to poetry and non-fiction, was also the youngest ever recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award, which she won in 1993 for her non-fiction book Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal.

"It's delightful as one approaches one's forties to be called 'new,'" Connelly said in her acceptance speech. She also praised broadband and communications company Orange for sponsoring a prize that honours the "old, cumbersome" medium of books, and paid tribute to a list of Burmese writers.

Joanna Reid, another Canadian writer, was also announced as the winner of the short story competition organized by Orange and Harper's Bazaar magazine. In awarding her the £1,000 (about $2,100 Cdn) prize, the jury praised Reid's writing as "both powerful and visual … she shows huge potential."

Young Nigerian author wins main prize

Later in the London ceremony, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the main, £30,000 (about $63,200 Cdn) Orange Broadband Prize for fiction for Half of a Yellow Sun.

Set in the 1960s, her novel follows three characters — a poor servant boy, a young, middle-class Nigerian woman and an Englishman — living in Lagos amid the violence and upheaval of the Nigeria-Biafra war.

"The judges and I were hugely impressed by the power, ambition and skill of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel," said jury chair Muriel Gray.

"It's astonishing, not just in the skillful subject matter, but in the brilliance of its accessibility."

Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, had also been a finalist for the Orange Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

The Orange Broadband Prize honours an English-language fiction work by a female author published in the U.K. Past winners include Canadians Carol Shields and Anne Michaels as well as Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, Ann Patchett and Kate Grenville.