Madeline Miller's Faithful Approach to Homer Was Key to Her Orange Prize Win

Greek myths have a universal appeal: we half-remember them, and want to hear them again (though it can't have hurt to have a classicist on the Orange prize judging panel). The past few years have been rich in new riffs on Homer, not least Zachary Mason's daring, experimental Lost Books of the Odyssey, Dan Simmons's science-fiction epics, in which the Iliad is replayed on 30th-century Mars, and Alice Oswald's pared-down poem Memorial, which counts the human cost of the Trojan war through the stories of those who fell.

In her polished debut novel The Song of Achilles,