Adichie leads Orange prize race

Adichie is nominated for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is favourite to win the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

She is one of six contenders for the £30,000 women-only award, to be announced on Wednesday.

Kiran Desai, whose novel The Inheritance of Loss won last year's Booker Prize, is also up for the award.

Xiaolu Guo is nominated for A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, a romantic comedy written in deliberately bad English.

Adichie's book, Half of a Yellow Sun, is her second novel and is set during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war of the 1960s.

ORANGE BETTING Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun - evens Anne Tyler - Digging To America 3/1 Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss 7/2 Rachel Cusk - Arlington Park 7/1 Jane Harris - The Observations 8/1 Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers 12/1 Source: Ladbrokes

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was also shortlisted for the award - formally known as the Orange Prize for Fiction - in 2004.

Bookmakers Ladbrokes makes her favourite to clinch the honours after a flood of bets in recent days.

Desai is third favourite to win and would become the first author to win both the Orange Prize and the Booker if she triumphs.

London ceremony

Guo is the 12/1 outsider for the prize.

Although this is her third novel, this is her first to be written in English and centres on a Chinese girl sent by her parents to study in London.

The other contenders are Rachel Cusk for Arlington Park, Anne Tyler for Digging to America, and Jane Harris for her debut novel The Observations.

The award ceremony will take place at the newly-refurbished Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank.