DEIRDRE Madden has won the Listowel Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year Award (£4,000) for her novel, One By One In The Darkness. This follows her shortlisting yesterday for the Orange Prize for Fiction. The competition which carries a prize fund of £30,000, is for women only and judged by women only. The other short listed writers are Margaret Atwood, Jane Mendelsohn, Anne Michaels, E. Annie Proulx and Manda Scott. The winner will be announced on June 4th (you'll be too busy doing your Bloomsday campaign to save Joycean Dublin to notice).

The Orange usually provokes a bit of controversy last year there were allegations that the prize ghettoised women.

This year one of the judges, Lisa Jardine, has replied to Richard Gott's article in the New Statesmen about the "feminisation of fiction" - (which revealed that women consume 70 to 80 per cent of the stuff) - by writing in the Guardian that the latest partriachal backlash is to sideline fiction as "a women's thing."

Incidentally, Mo Mowlam is one of the patrons of the prize.