Heavyweights vie for book prize

Adichie is from Nigeria but moved to the US when she was 19 to study

Award-winning novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Aravind Adiga will go head-to-head for this year's John Llewellyn Rhys literary prize.

Adichie's short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck is her first work since winning The Orange Prize in 2007 for Half of a Yellow Sun.

Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize last year for his novel The White Tiger.

The pair are also up against poet Emma Jones, James Maskalyk, Tristram Stuart and Evie Wyld.

Global concerns

The winner, who will receive £5,000 in prize money, will be announced in London on 30 November.

Jones' The Striped World is the Australian's first poetry collection.

Maskalyk's Six Months in Sudan is based on a blog the Canadian doctor wrote while working for Medecins sans Frontiere.

Stuart's book Waste is a no-holds-barred examination of the poverty and rising food costs in developing nations.

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is Evie Wyld's debut novel is set on Australia's east coast. The writer has dual nationality - Australian and British.

The John Llewellyn Rhys award is presented annually to a UK or Commonwealth writer aged under 35 for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry.

The second oldest literary prize in Britain, it was established in 1942 to honour the writer John Llewellyn Rhys, who was killed in action in World War II.