Zadie Smith wins fiction prize

Britain’s Zadie Smith won the Orange Prize for Fiction on Tuesday with her third novel, “On Beauty.”

Smith, 30, had been the favorite for the $53,600 prize, which celebrates excellence in English-language writing by women.

“On Beauty” -- a campus novel set at an Ivy League college and modeled on E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” -- beat a shortlist that included “The History of Love” by American novelist Nicole Krauss and Australian writer Carrie Tiffany’s “Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living.”