COSTA BOOKS AWARDS WINNERS AND   SHORTLIST

The category award winners were announced 5th January

Costa Novel Award

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall: a vividly told tale of Tudor intrigue about the blacksmith's son who rose to become one of the most powerful men in England. Booker winner. In stock
Penelope Lively's Family Album, about adult children who return to the family home and the memories it holds for them.
Christopher Nicholson's The Elephant Keeper about a young stable boy who forms an attachment to two elephants in 18th-century Britain.

WINNER: Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, about an Irish immigrant's adjustment to post-Second World War America in Brooklyn.

Best First Novel

Rachel Heath - The Finest Type of English Womanhood
Peter Murphy - John the Revelator
WINNER: Raphael Selbourne - Beauty
Ali Shaw - The Girl with Glass Feet

Biography

WINNER: Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius.
William Fiennes's The Music Room: "a small masterpiece, a tribute to the power of place, family and memory"
Simon Gray's Coda: his memoir about dying of cancer.
Caroline Moorehead's Dancing to the Precipice: the life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, a courtier who survived the French Revolution and fled to the New World.

Poetry

Clive James - Angels Over Elsinore
Katharine Kilalea - One Eyed Leigh
Ruth Padel - Darwin: A Life in Poems (in stock)
WINNER: Christopher Reid - A Scattering (in stock)

Children's literature

Siobhan Dowd - Solace of the Road
Mary Hoffman - Troubadour
WINNER: Patrick Ness - The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking: Book Two)
Anna Perera - Guantanamo Boy (in stock)