The £30,000 Orange Prize for Fiction, for women writers only, was announced on 18th April 2005. The shortlist is as follows:

- Billie Morgan by Joolz Denby, a semi-autobiographical work about a "biker chick" from Bradford who commits a murder but tries to bury her past in a search for a more respectable life.

- Old Filth by Jane Gardam, the poignant reminiscences of an antediluvian colonial judge in his dying days.

- The Mammoth Cheese by the American author Sheri Holman, a satire on modern American politics set in a small Virginian town.

- A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a farcical debut novel by Marina Lewycka about a vulgar 36-year-old Ukrainian woman who marries a widower 48 years her senior to get a British passport.

- Liars and Saints, another first novel by the American Maile Meloy, a 300-page saga about four generations of a dysfunctional Roman Catholic family in California.

- We Need to Talk About Kevin, an uncompromising seventh novel by the feminist American writer Lionel Shriver inspired by the Columbine school shootings about a mother who hates her son. He grows up delinquent and, aged 16, kills seven schoolmates with a crossbow. Shriver's take on motherhood was so controversial that many agents and publishers in the US and Britain refused to touch her book.

With the exception of Gardam, a British writer in her mid seventies who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978, the writers are so little known that the field is regarded as wide open this year, and early interest is likely to focus as much on the authors' backgrounds as their books.

The prize will be awarded at a party in London on 7th June 2005.