Bibliofemme News
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18/03/2004
Rowling wins adult prize
JK Rowling conquered a new field on Tuesday night by winning her first prize as an adult author. She triumphed by public vote in the £5,000 WH Smith fiction award. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was short-listed in the category - usually reserved for books for adults - in acknowledgement of Rowling's appeal to older readers.
A delighted Rowling beat another book with appeal to both age groups, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and stories by the horror specialist James Herbert and Ian Rankin.
Monica Ali's widely cherished Brick Lane, about a Bangladeshi woman settling in London in an arranged marriage, won in the debut fiction category - its first book award so far. She called the result "a real thrill".
Some 148,000 people voted via the WH Smith website or in stores. The results normally reflect bestseller lists and the chain's spending promoting titles. The WH Smith literary award, the only one decided by judges, went to the US novelist Richard Powers for his The Time of Our Singing, about three generations of a mixed-race family from the 1930s onwards.
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