June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Marilynne Robinson won the Orange Prize for Fiction, receiving 30,000 pounds ($49,500) and a bronze statuette after overcoming competition from five other novelists including fellow Americans Ellen Feldman and Samantha Hunt in Britain’s annual literary award for women.

Robinson was honored during a ceremony this evening at London’s Royal Festival Hall for her novel, “Home,” which revisits some of the setting and characters of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gilead” (2004). The judges praised the author for creating “a kind, wise, enriching novel.”

“We were unanimously agreed,” the head of the judging panel, broadcaster Fi Glover, said in an e-mailed statement. “It is a profound work of art.”

The annual Orange Prize was founded in 1996 to celebrate fiction by women worldwide. This year’s finalists displayed a broad range of historical, intellectual and political interests.

In Robinson’s “Home” (Virago/Farrar), the prodigal son among Reverend Robert Boughton’s eight children returns to rural Gilead, Iowa, in 1956, years after disgrace forced him to leave. Now 41, Jack Boughton finds an elderly father who is dying and his youngest sister, Glory, who has moved back home after the collapse of a long engagement.

It’s summer in Gilead, “a cluster of houses strung along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower.”

Scottsboro, Tesla

The five runners-up in the contest included Feldman’s “Scottsboro” (Picador/Norton), a fictionalized account of a notorious Depression-era event in Alabama in which nine black youths were accused of gang-raping two white women.

Hunt’s “The Invention of Everything Else” (Harvill Secker/Houghton Mifflin) imagines the last weeks of the Serbian- born scientist Nikola Tesla and his odd relationship with a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker.

Also on the short list were Samantha Harvey’s “The Wilderness” (Cape/Talese), the story of a man in his 60s who struggles to hold onto his memories and identity under the onslaught of Alzheimer’s disease.

Deirdre Madden made the final round with “Molly Fox’s Birthday” (Faber), a meditation on the nature of identity and relationships built around the lives of a playwright, an actor and a mutual friend.

Kamila Shamsie became a finalist with “Burnt Shadows” (Bloomsbury), an epic narrative stretching from Nagasaki in 1945 to the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay after 9/11.

In a second prize granted this evening, Francesca Kay won the Orange Award for New Writers for her novel “An Equal Stillness” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

The 10,000-pound bursary for the New Writers award is provided by Arts Council England. The Orange Prize itself is anonymously endowed.

Previous Orange Prize recipients have included Rose Tremain and Zadie Smith.

To contact the writer on the story: James Pressley in Brussels at jpressley@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 3, 2009 14:15 EDT