Nigeria's Adichie hot favourite for Orange prize

LONDON, June 5 (Reuters) Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was installed as hot favourite today to land the Orange Prize, a major literary award for fiction in English written by women.

The Orange, set up in 1996, has a distinctly international flavour in 2007 with authors shortlisted from five countries.

''The vast majority of the money we've seen has been for Adichie.

Punters reckon it's in the bag,'' said a spokesman for bookmakers Ladbrokes who made her 5-4 favourite to scoop the 30,000 pound prize tomorrow night.

Adichie, whose debut novel ''Purple Hibiscus'' was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2004, hopes to make it second time lucky with ''Half of a Yellow Sun.'' The critically acclaimed novel is set in 1960s Nigeria at the time of the Biafran civil war.

Second favourite -- and also making her second appearance on the shortlist -- is Pulitzer Prize-winning US author Anne Tyler for ''Digging to America'' which probes cultural differences in American society. She is quoted at odds of 11-4.

Next in line with the bookmakers is Indian novelist Kiran Desai who last year became the youngest winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for ''The Inheritance of Loss'' about an embittered judge seeking a quiet retirement in the Himalayas.

Jane Harris, born in Belfast, is a 6-1 shot for her debut novel ''The Observations'' which tells the tale of Bessy Buckley who goes to work for a beautiful mysterious figure in Edinburgh.

Briton Rachel Cusk's ''Arlington Park,'' an 8-1 shot, is set in a modern-day English suburb on a single rainy day.

The shortlist is completed by the 10-1 outsider Xiaolu Guo for her romantic comedy ''A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers'' which is written in deliberately bad English.

Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and Lionel Shriver rank as three of the most prominent past winners of the prize which consistently stokes controversy among literary critics and authors.

The late novelist Kingsley Amis once said he would not care to win it if he were a woman. Female author A S Byatt said the prize ''ghettoised'' women.

REUTERS DS PM0907