The winner of this year’s Orange Prize for women’s fiction, Andrea Levy, has beaten this year’s winner of Booker Prize, Alan Hollinghurst, in the competition for the Whitbread Award, it was announced last night in London. As a report in The Independent by Louise Jury details, Levy’s “Small Island, about post-war multicultural Britain, defeated Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, a dissection of Thatcherite Britain, as well as Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres and Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.” Meanwhile, Michael Symmons Roberts won the poetry prize for Corpus, and Susan Fletcher won the first novel award for Eve Green (beating the “much-hyped” Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke). One of the winners will be announced as the winner of the £30,000 “book of the year” award later this month.