Debut Novel From Nigeria Storms Orange Shortlist

A 25-year-old Nigerian teacher today becomes the first writer from the African country to reach the shortlist of a British literary prize.

With her first novel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has fought her way to the final heat of the £30,000 Orange award, defeating more than a dozen highly tipped and experienced authors.

Her novel, Purple Hibiscus, a Nigerian coming-of-age story set during the military dictatorship of the mid-90s, is now a contender for the women-only prize in the most formidable shortlist of any book contest this year - a list stronger in depth than at the final stage of either the Booker or Whitbread prizes.

Adichie is up against the Booker prizewinner Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Gillian Slovo's panoramic vision of communist Russia, The Ice Road, and three other novels.

No Nigerian writer - not even Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1986 - has reached the final of the Orange or the Booker, the only big British awards which are open to Commonwealth authors.

An internal leak of Adichie's success generated excitement in the book trade yesterday. Martin Higgs, who edits Waterstone's customer magazine, said it was "a huge achievement" to reach the shortlist, especially for a first novel. He said Purple Hibiscus would be easy to promote and should sell well.

Adichie studied medicine at the University of Nigeria, where her father was deputy vice-chancellor. But she is at present a student attending writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University in the US.

Told the news yesterday, she said: "I'm surprised and think it's wonderful that a novel written by a black African woman has made it to the shortlist. I couldn't be more thrilled."

Among the 16 books which she beat on the Orange longlist were Monica Ali's praised and hyped Brick Lane - which has proved unlucky in all its prize entries this year - and Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal, a blow-by-blow account of the seduction of a schoolboy.

The Orange award's founder, Kate Mosse, who is not one of the judges, said the list was "staggeringly good". She said Atwood's Oryx and Crake, a dystopian story of a future reduced to madness by genetic engineering gone wrong, was the work of a great writer: "The future is not only bad - it's even worse than you thought."

And the US prize-winning author Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, a novel of the second world war which took 18 years to write, managed to live up to the Australian-born writer's already enormous reputation.

Atwood's book, which contemplates the end of life as we know it with the wit and ingenuity of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, is seen as the frontrunner for the prize, despite its lack of success in this year's other awards.

Its rival for ambition of theme is The Ice Road, written with the insight of a woman whose father, Joe Slovo, was the most senior communist in the ANC.

Rose Tremain's historical novel, The Colour, is the only book by a white British author chosen for the list. Tremain, a bestseller, has been a multiple prizewinner, most recently taking the Whitbread novel award.

The sixth title is Small Island, by Andrea Levy, a British woman with Jamaican parents. The singer and actor Marsha Hunt said of one of her previous novels: "Andrea Levy is the long-awaited birdsong of one born gifted and black in Britain."

The Orange prize's chief judge, the broadcaster Sandi Toksvig, said: "The shortlist ranges from the fledgling author to the famous; the factually based story to the fantastical; from the minutiae of the domestic to the broad sweep of the political. Not bad for six books."

Six of the best

The Colour by Rose Tremain

Joseph Blackstone emigrates with wife and mother to farm in 19th-century New Zealand. Then Joseph finds gold in a creek, first hides this from his family, then abandons them to go prospecting

The Ice Road by Gillian Slovo

Should the good father and communist manager Boris Ivanov risk backing the hero of Leningrad, Sergei Kirov, in 1933? And if so, what will happen to his daughter Natasha?

A clue: Kirov's mysterious assassination in 1934 was the trigger for Stalin to unleash purges

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Snats (a crossbreed of snakes and rats) are one of the hastily abandoned experiments of the brave new world of genetic engineering. Rakkunks (cuddlier than raccoons, not smelly like skunks) are more popular. But the horrors of the future into which scientists are heading are hinted at by the barbaric computer games their children play...

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie's father was a deputy vice-chancellor. Her heroine Kambili's father is a newspaper owner, devoutly Catholic, repressive at home. When the military regime targets him, he sends Kambili to the countryside for safety, where she discovers the heathen world he has kept from her

Small Island by Andrea Levy

Stories beginning "My grandpappy came to London from Jamaica in 1948 and found it so cold" have grown common since West Indian immigration began to be celebrated. But this is exceptional because it is told by a woman and acknowledges that Britain after the war was felt to be poorer in some ways than the Caribbean

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

Hazzard's first US prizewinner since The Transit of Venus in 1981. A study of the shadows and shames left in the memory by the last war, it opens with a character saying, "You keep returning to these things. You can't close them down, as one closes down the compartment of a damaged ship, just to keep the vessel going, or at least afloat"