Lionel Shriver at last night's award ceremony
Photograph: PA
"This is the closest I get to camping," quipped Sandi Toksvig, the host of last night's Orange awards – the 10th ever - which took place last night in a palatial marquee in a west London square. Toksvig had been invited back to host the event after chairing the judging panel at last year's awards and, predictably, she stole the show. "Last year I read 140 books," she told the audience. "This year I didn't read a single fucking one. I am in the unusual position of having judged the books on this year's shortlist entirely by their covers. There's a lot to be said for it."
When Lionel Shriver (a boy? winning the Orange prize?) was announced as the winner for her harrowing motherhood-and-massacre tale, We Need to Talk About Kevin, she had a hard act to follow. Describing herself as "overwhelmed", she clearly hadn't expected to win, and began by saying "I have here a piece of paper that I brought with me just in case – it's titled 'Notes on "acceptance speech" – may prove humiliating in retrospect'." She went on to thank her husband "who promised to still love me if I lost", and her publishers, Serpent's Tail, who, with two books on the shortlist (Billie Morgan by Joolz Denby the other), were having a great night anyway. "'Kevin' is difficult, dark and uncomfortable," Shriver said, apparently having neglected to talk to her publicity people about how to sell her book to those audience members who hadn't yet read it. "In fact," she went on, laughing nervously, "there are a lot of people out there who hate it." Not the judges, obviously, although the other five shortlisted authors were doubtless entertaining a few dark thoughts about it at the time.
