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A heavyweight novelist, a Poet Laureate and a little known paediatric nurse from London are among those shortlisted for this year’s Costa Book Awards and hoping to be crowned overall winner and receive that £30,000 prize fund.
Now in its 40th year, the Costa Book Awards (formerly known as the Whitbread Book Awards) sets out to reward well-written and universally appealing books ranging across five broad categories: novel, first novel, biography, poetry and children’s book. The only award of its kind to set side by side adult and children’s fiction and encompass both established and unknown writers, the Costa Book Awards are renowned for bringing into the bestseller charts a whole host of exciting literature that might otherwise go unmissed. And with warped fairytale thrillers, a Dickens biography and a new collection of poetry from Carol Ann Duffy in the running, it looks like this year’s Costa Book Awards is no exception to the rule of inclusivity and variety.
Awash with experience and a showering of literary awards, the novel section this year will be a battleground between a range of highly competent writers. Ranging from Andrew Miller’s macabre tale Pure, of the demolition of Paris’ history in the French Revolution, to the Atonement-style World War One love conflict of Louisa Young’s My Dear I Wanted to Tell You into John Burnside’s hallucinogenic myth-horror story in A Summer of Drowning, each of the shortlisted are by no means analogous. The most well-known of all the novel writers, however, is Booker prize winner Julian Barnes whose novel The Sense of an Ending explores memory, the mutable past and the mystery of self-perception.
Yet the category that has prompted most interest by far this year is the first novel and in particular Tiny Sunbirds Far Away written by Christie Watson who for 18 years has practiced as an intensive care nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Described by the Costa judges as ‘‘funny, heartbreaking and utterly real’’, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away captures childhood in Africa and the persisting love of families despite all. While Watson claims she always dreamed of writing, it was only after the birth of her daughter that she dared to put pen to paper, drawing on the experiences of her African husband. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Watson said, ‘‘I became a writer for the same reasons I became a nurse: in order to make sense of world. I didn’t choose this novel, this novel chose me.’’ In competition with Watson for first novel winner are three other novels united by a strong sense of place, from the multicultural Jamaica of Kerry Young’s Pao to the Soviet dictatorship of The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness, to Kevin Barry’s futuristic depiction of tribal warfare in Western Ireland in 2053 in City of Bohane.
The biography category also offers a great deal of breadth with two autobiographies from journalist Patrick Cockburn on his son’s experience of schizophrenia and Julia Blackburn’s memories of the mezzadri she encountered in an Italian mountain village, alongside a biography of Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin and of poet Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis. The poetry category, in which Jo Shapcott won overall Costa winner last year with Of Mutability, offers a selection of probing themes, from the dark nightmares of David Harsent to the elegiac and grittily Northern verse of Sean O’Brien, and to poems of family warmth and human friendship in Fierce by Jackie Kay. Carol Ann Duffy’s new collection Bees, the first since her appointment as Poet Laureate, is also likely to draw in a great deal of interest given the huge success of her last work Love Poems in 2010. The children’s book category, commonly overlooked by the literary industry, also offers four very different books for a range of ages united by a sense of adventure and darker mysteries.
The winners of each of the five categories will be announced on January 4th with the overall winner of the Costa Book Awards and £30,000 decided on January 24th.
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