Tea Obreht is the surprise winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, receiving £30,000 and a bronze statuette called "the Bessie" after overcoming competition from Irish writer Emma Donoghue and four other novelists.
At 25, the Serbian-American writer is the youngest author to capture the award.
She was honored during a ceremony this evening at London's Royal Festival Hall for The Tiger's Wife (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), a debut novel set in a Balkan country ravaged by war and narrated by a young physician named Natalia. As the story opens, Natalia learns, while delivering vaccines to an orphanage, that her beloved grandfather has died in mysterious circumstances. Piecing together stories her grandfather told her as a child, Natalia is drawn into a web of fables, allegories and violent events borrowed from newspaper headlines.
Along the way, Obreht "reminds us how easily we can slip into barbarity," said the head of the judging panel, Bettany Hughes. "Obreht's powers of observation and her understanding of the world are remarkable," Ms Hughes said in an e-mailed statement.
"By skillfully spinning a series of magical tales, she has managed to bring the tragedy of chronic Balkan conflict thumping into our front rooms with a bittersweet vivacity."
First awarded in 1996, the prize was founded to celebrate fiction by women worldwide. The bookies' favorite to win this year's prize was Emma Donoghue's Room (Picador).
Donoghue's ninth novel is a dark tale about a boy who lives with his mother in a locked room.
The book, which recently won the Hughes & Hughes Novel of the Year Award and was also shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, was inspired by the Josef Fritzl case.
In addition to being the bookies' favourite, Room was yesterday selected by the six teenage members of the 2011 Orange Prize youth panel as their overall winner for this year.
Donoghue described herself as "tickled pink" to be selected by the panel.
"When I wrote Room I was imagining a reader anything from 11 up, so I'm really chuffed it's finding so many young readers."
Other finalists for the Orange Prize were Aminatta Forna for The Memory of Love, Emma Henderson for Grace Williams Says it Loud, Nicole Krauss for Great House and Kathleen Winter for Annabel.
Now in its 16th year, the prize is awarded for the best novel of the year written by a woman in the English language.
Previous winners of the award include Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson, Rose Tremain, Andrea Levy, Lionel Shriver and Zadie Smith.
The judges for the 2011 Orange Prize include journalist Susanna Reid, publisher Liz Calder, novelist Tracy Chevalier and actor Helen Lederer. Broadcaster, historian and author Bettany Hughes is chair of the panel.
Ms Hughes described this year’s shortlist as one “which should give hours of reading pleasure to the wider world”.
Additional reporting: Bloomberg
