Click here to watch video from the event.
Vicky Shaw
An author who placed herself in the shoes of an Eastern European man who comes to Britain to find work has won this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
Rose Tremain was last night announced as the winner for her 10th novel, The Road Home.
The competition celebrates women's writing and the prize is a £30,000 cheque and the Bessie, a limited edition bronze figurine, which were awarded at a ceremony at London's Royal Festival Hall.
The Road Home centres around Lev, who arrives with no job, little money and a few words of English.
Behind him loom the figures of his dead wife, his beloved daughter and his friend Rudy.
The book tells how he deals with the strangeness of Britain with its hostile streets, lonely flats and obsession with celebrity, but the city of London also holds out the possibilities of friendship, money, sex and a new career.
Kirsty Lang, chairwoman of the judges, said: "I think we all felt it was a fantastic exercise in empathy. She succeeded in putting herself in the head of an Eastern European migrant in contemporary Britain.
"She managed to tell the story in a very powerful way. It's a male character, it's a man in his 40s. She absolutely gets inside his head."
This was the 13th Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction to be awarded and it goes to the "best novel of the year" written in English by a woman.
Previous winners include Zadie Smith for On Beauty in 2006 and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun last year.
Joanna Kavenna was also announced at the ceremony as the 2008 winner of the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers for her novel Inglorious. She won a £10,000 bursary, provided by the Arts Council England.
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