Former psychiatric patient's first novel makes Orange list

A first-time novelist whose work was inspired by spending a third of her life as a psychiatric patient is in the running for the £30,000 Orange Prize alongside the winners of the Man Booker and Costa awards.

Clare Allan, whose novel, Poppy Shakespeare, is set in a psychiatric hospital, was named yesterday as one of 20 women on the longlist for this year's award, now renamed the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

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Her rivals include Kiran Desai, who has already won the Booker with The Inheritance of Loss, and Stef Penney, who took the Costa with The Tenderness of Wolves.

But Allan, 38, who lives in London, said she was "absolutely thrilled" to have made such a strong list with her debut published work.

She wrote two unpublished novels before she had a breakdown in her mid-twenties. When she finally emerged from the system after a decade of care, including some when she was sectioned, the world of psychiatry seemed appropriate material to use for her new attempt at fiction.

"It had always been something I had done and wanted to do, but when I first broke down, I didn't read or write at all. The first few years [in the system] were very damaging and a lot of the time after that I was involved in repairing the damage that the treatment had brought about. I think that's a common experience," she said.

"But certainly it has provided me with very rich material. It is such an extreme place and you see people stripped bare. People tend to think if you're going to talk about mental health you're going to be incredibly sombre and serious and heartfelt and of course it is serious, but there's an enormous amount of humour and comedy and it's a shame if that doesn't come out."

She emphasised that the novel was completely fictional, even if she hoped it would make people think about mental health differently. "People say it's semi-autobiographical but it's so not. And the moment someone says 'psychiatric' they think it must be a misery memoir, but it's not."

Announcing the longlist yesterday, Muriel Gray, chair of the judges, sounded a note of caution about the "depressing" number of "self-censored women writing thinly-veiled auto-biographical stories about broken marriages or the death of a child. They are simply not imaginative and ingenious enough". But she said that women's fiction in general was in "tremendously good shape".

The list has several established writers, including Margaret Forster, for her 23rd novel, Over; Jane Smiley, for her 12th novel, Ten Days in the Hills and Anne Tyler, with Digging to America, her 16th novel. Tyler was also on the first longlist 12 years ago.

Other previous Orange nominees include the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, nominated for her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun , which has also been featured on the Richard and Judy book club; Patricia Ferguson, for Peripheral Vision, and Rachel Seiffert, for Afterwards. There are eight first-time novelists and nearly half the contenders are British.

Rodney Troubridge, the fiction expert for Waterstone's, said: "This is possibly the strongest longlist for any award I've seen in some years."

The prize, which has been renamed, will be awarded on 6 June.

The longlist

* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun

* Clare Allan - Poppy Shakespeare

* Rachel Cusk - Arlington Park

* Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

* Patricia Ferguson - Peripheral Vision

* Margaret Forster - Over

* Lisa Moore - Alligator

* Nell Freudenberger - The Dissident

* Rebecca Gowers - When to Walk

* Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

* Jane Harris - The Observations

* M. J. Hyland - Carry Me Down

* Lori Lansens - The Girls

* Catherine O'Flynn - What Was Lost

* Stef Penney - The Tenderness of Wolves

* Deborah Robertson - Careless

* Rachel Seiffert - Afterwards

* Jane Smiley - Ten Days in the Hills

* Anne Tyler - Digging to America

* Melanie Wallace - The Housekeeper