Barbara Kingsolver in 2009 at her farm in northwestern Virginia. / Photo by Annie Griffiths Belt, Special to the Star Tribune

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver won the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, it was announced June 16. She won for "The Lacuna," her first novel in nine years.

Kingsolver, known for books like "The Poisonwood Bible" and "The Bean Trees," appeared in St. Paul last November as part of the Talking Volumes author series. Go here for Star Tribune writer Kristin Tillotson's interview with Kingsolver last fall. It includes photos, audio samples and an excerpt from "The Lacuna."

Barbara Kingsolver

The odds-on favorite for the Orange Prize this year was British historical novelist Hilary Mantel, for her book "Wolf Hall." The prize, open to any novel by a woman published in English, comes with a cash award of $45,000.

In "The Lacuna," an an American boy named Harrison Shepherd grows up in Mexico in the 1920s with his man-hopping mother. Harrison winds up working for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, meeting Leon Trotsky and witnessing social revolution both in Mexico City and back home in the States, where he eventually becomes a celebrated writer. But he is caught up in a McCarthy-foreshadowing scandal fomented and distorted by rabid media.

Other shortlisted titles for the Orange Prize included American writer Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stairs"; Attica Locke's "Black Water Rising"; Briton Rosie Alison's "The Very Thought of You," and British-Trinidadian writer Monique Roffey's "The White Woman on the Green Bicycle."