CHIMAMANDA Adichie's Half of  Yellow Sun has been voted as the best women's work of fiction over the last decade winning the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction after being described as the best of the best by the panel of judges.

Pitted against nine other titles including Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, Half of a Yellow Sun, was named the winner by both the public and a 10-strong judging panel. Other novels that were up for consideration included Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife and Marilynne Robinson’s Home.

Baileys chose to mark its 20th anniversary by asking its judges over the past 10 years including Joanna Trollope, Shami Chakrabarti and Daisy Goodwin to pick their best of the best from the last decade. Andrea Levy’s Small Island, which won the award in 2004, had previously been named the best of the best novel in the prize’s first decade.

Author and journalist Muriel Gray, who chaired the judging panel in 2007 when Adichie won the award at the age of just 29, said that while it is sometimes pompous to call a book important, it’s appropriate to say it of Half of a Yellow Sun. Ms Adichie was also voted winner of the best of the best accolade by members of the public, following a fortnight of programming on Woman’s Hour, in which each chair of judges was interviewed about the novel they had championed. 

Ms Gray said: “For an author, so young at the time of writing to have been able to tell a tale of such enormous scale in terms of human suffering and the consequences of hatred and division, whilst also gripping the reader with wholly convincing characters and spellbinding plot, is an astonishing feat. Chimamanda’s achievement makes Half of a Yellow Sun not just a worthy winner of this most special of prizes but a benchmark for excellence in fiction writing.” 

Ms Adichie added: “This is a prize I have a lot of respect and admiration for as over the years it’s brought wonderful literature to a wide readership that might not have found many of the books. I feel I am in very good company and to be selected as Best of the Best of the past decade is such an honour and I’m very grateful and very happy.”

Changing sponsorship has meant that the honour has been variously known over the past decade as the Women’s prize for fiction, the Orange prize for fiction and the Orange Broadband prize for fiction before acquiring its current name in 2014.  The 10 winners of the prize over the last 10 years were:

2006 - On Beauty by Zadie Smith (Chair, Martha Kearney)
2007 – Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Chair, Muriel Gray)
2008 – The Road Home by Rose Tremain (Chair, Kirsty Lang)
2009 – Home by Marilynne Robinson (Chair, Fi Glover)
2010 – The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (Chair, Daisy Goodwin)
2011 – The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (Chair, Bettany Hughes)
2012 – The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (Chair, Joanna Trollope)
2013 – May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes (Chair, Miranda Richardson)
2014 – A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (Chair, Helen Fraser)
2015 – How to Be Both by Ali Smith (Chair, Shami Chakrabarti)