Lauren Liebenberg has been shortlisted for the Orange Debut award, having already joined fellow Little, Brown Book Group authors Linda Grant, Stella Duffy and Jennifer Egan on the longlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
Lauren's The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam is one of three titles jostling for the debut crown, with the winner being announced in June. It has received some rave reviews:
‘This is an outstanding first novel’ Daily Mail
‘Excellent and unsettling book... The details are astonishingly vivid: Rhodesia springs to fecund, fetid life before your eyes. What’s especially impressive is the way Liebenberg avoids the overcooked beauty that characterises so many self-consciously ”literary” first efforts. It is immediate, vivid and rarely judgemental, like the children at its heart. It is also charming, upsetting and poignantly strange to a reader who knows little of southern Africa and its recent history – a book that, like the dreaded guineaworm, burrows deep under your skin’ Carrie O’Grady in the Guardian
Lauren also joined former winner Linda Grant and her novel The Clothes on Their Backs in the running for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, along with second-time nominee Stella Duffy, for The Room of Lost Things, and former National Book Award finalist Jennifer Egan, for The Keep.