The Costa Book Awards is the only major UK book prize that is open solely to authors resident in the UK and Ireland and also, uniquely, recognises the most enjoyable books across five categories – First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book – published in the last year.
Originally established in 1971 by Whitbread Plc, Costa announced its takeover of the sponsorship of one of the UK's most prestigious book prizes in 2006. 2016 marks the 45th year of the Book Awards.
This year’s Costa Book Awards attracted 596 entries. Judges on this year’s panels (three per category) included writers Nicci Gerrard, Andrew O’Hagan, Mary Loudon, Matthew Dennison, poet, author and vlogger Jen Campbell and author-illustrator, Cressida Cowell.
Winners in the five categories, who each receive £5,000, will be announced on Tuesday 3rd January 2017. The overall winner of the 2016 Costa Book of the Year will receive £30,000 and will be selected and announced at the Costa Book Awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 31st January 2017.
“I'm certain that readers of all tastes will find something to enjoy in this fantastic selection of books,” commented Dominic Paul, Managing Director of Costa. “My thanks go to the category judges who read so extensively and chose so carefully, and many congratulations to the shortlisted authors. We’re very proud of our heritage and connection with the Book Awards at Costa and we wish them all great success."
The winner of the Costa Short Story Award, voted for by the public, will also be announced at the ceremony. The shortlisted three stories for the Costa Short Story Award, now in its fifth year, will be revealed on the Costa Book Awards website, www.costabookawards.com, later this month.
Since the introduction of the Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won 11 times by a novel, five times by a first novel, six times by a biography, seven times by a collection of poetry and twice by a children’s book. The 2015 Costa Book of the Year was The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge.
To be eligible for the 2016 Costa Book Awards, books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland between 1 November 2015 and 31 October 2016 and their authors resident in the UK for the previous three years.
For additional information please visit www.costabookawards.com.
COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2016 SHORTLISTS
2016 Costa Novel Award shortlist
Sebastian Barry for Days Without End (Faber & Faber)
Maggie O’Farrell for This Must Be the Place (Tinder Press)
Sarah Perry for The Essex Serpent (Serpent’s Tail)
Rose Tremain for The Gustav Sonata (Chatto & Windus)
2016 Costa First Novel Award shortlist
Susan Beale for The Good Guy (John Murray)
Kit de Waal for My Name is Leon (Viking)
Guinevere Glasfurd for The Words in My Hand (Two Roads)
Francis Spufford for Golden Hill (Faber & Faber)
2016 Costa Biography Award shortlist
Keggie Carew for Dadland: A Journey into Uncharted Territory (Chatto & Windus)
John Guy for Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years (Viking)
Hisham Matar for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Viking)
Sylvia Patterson for I’m Not with the Band: A Writer’s Life Lost in Music (Sphere)
2016 Costa Poetry Award shortlist
Melissa Lee-Houghton for Sunshine (Penned in the Margins)
Alice Oswald for Falling Awake (Jonathan Cape Poetry)
Denise Riley for Say Something Back (Picador)
Kate Tempest for Let Them Eat Chaos (Picador)
2016 Costa Children’s Book Award shortlist
Brian Conaghan for The Bombs That Brought Us Together (Bloomsbury)
Patrice Lawrence for Orangeboy (Hodder Children’s Books)
Francesca Simon for The Monstrous Child (Faber & Faber/Profile Books)
Ross Welford for Time Travelling with a Hamster (HarperCollins Children’s Books)
Shortlist for the 2016 Costa Novel Award
(171 entries)
Judges
Matthew Bates Fiction Buyer, WHSmith Travel
Nicci Gerrard Writer
Lisa O’Kelly Literary Editor, The Observer
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)
After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and, ultimately, the Civil War. Having fled terrible hardships themselves, they find these days to be vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they both witness and are complicit in. Their lives are further enriched and endangered when a young Indian girl crosses their path, and the possibility of lasting happiness emerges, if only they can survive.
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His novels and plays have won the Costa Book of the Year (2008), the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, the Independent Booksellers Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He also had two consecutive novels, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in Wicklow.
Judges: “A beautiful, poetic book – heart-wrenching and hopeful in equal measure.”
This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)
Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex-film star given to shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway. He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with twenty years ago, and this discovery will send him off-course, far away from wife and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?
Maggie O’Farrell is the author of seven novels: After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award and This Must be the Place. She lives in Edinburgh.
Judges: “An utterly involving read, both funny and heartbreaking – technically dazzling, but never losing its human touch.”
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (Serpent’s Tail)
Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890s, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way… They are Cora Seaborne, and Will Ransome. Cora is a well-to-do London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist, is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species. But Will sees his parishioners' agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith. Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart.
Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979. She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway, and has been the Writer-in-Residence at Gladstone’s Library and the UNESCO World City of Literature Writer-in-Residence in Prague. Her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the 2014 East Anglian Book of the Year Award. She lives in Norwich.
Judges: “This is the best kind of historical fiction – brimming with ideas and energy.”
The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus)
What is the difference between friendship and love? Or between neutrality and commitment? Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in 'neutral' Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem a distant echo. But Gustav's father has mysteriously died, and his adored mother Emilie is strangely cold and indifferent to him. Gustav's childhood is spent in lonely isolation, his only toy a tin train with painted passengers staring blankly from the carriage windows. As time goes on, an intense friendship with a boy of his own age, Anton Zwiebel, begins to define Gustav's life. Jewish and mercurial, a talented pianist tortured by nerves when he has to play in public, Anton fails to understand how deeply and irrevocably his life and Gustav's are entwined.
Rose Tremain’s bestselling novels have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Whitbread Novel Award (Music & Silence) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Sacred Country). Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and was appointed Chancellor of the University of East Anglia in 2013. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.
Judges: “A deft, delicate and vivid book in three movements – pitch perfect and humane.”
Shortlist for the 2016 Costa First Novel Award
(114 entries)
Judges
Justin Cartwright Author
Charlotte Heathcote Literary Editor, Daily and Sunday Express
Sheryl Shurville Co-owner of Chorleywood and Gerrards Cross Bookshops
The Good Guy by Susan Beale (John Murray)
Ted, a car tyre salesman in 1960s suburban New England, is a dreamer who craves admiration. His wife, Abigail, longs for a life of the mind. Single girl Penny just wants to be loved. After a chance encounter, Ted becomes enamoured with Penny and begins inventing a whole new life with her at its centre. But when this fantasy collides with reality, the fallout threatens everything and everyone he holds dear.
Susan Beale was raised on Cape Cod, lived in Belgium and France, and now lives in Wells, Somerset. She’s a former competitive figure skater who’s worked as a journalist and editor in the US and Europe, and is a recent graduate of the Bath Spa MA in Creative Writing. The inspiration for The Good Guy came from Susan's own adoption files.
Judges: “An absorbing and deeply affecting novel by a gifted storyteller. A joy to read.”
My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal (Viking)
Leon is nine, and has a perfect baby brother called Jake. They have gone to live with Maureen, who has fuzzy red hair like a halo, and a belly like Father Christmas. But the adults are speaking in low voices, and wearing Pretend faces. They are threatening to give Jake to strangers. Since Jake is white and Leon is not. As Leon struggles to cope with his anger, certain things can still make him smile – like Curly Wurlys, riding his bike fast downhill, burying his hands deep in the soil, hanging out with Tufty (who reminds him of his dad) and stealing enough coins so that one day he can rescue Jake and his mum.
Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother and Caribbean father and worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law. She was awarded the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize in both 2014 and 2015, the SI Leeds Literary Reader's Choice Prize 2014, and second place in both the 2014 Costa Short Story Award and Bath Short Story Award. Her short stories, ‘The Beautiful Thing’ and ‘Adrift at the Athena’ have also been produced for BBC Radio 4.
Judges: “Leon will break your heart, make you laugh and linger long in your memory. A perceptive and compassionate read.”
The Words in My Hand by Guinevere Glasfurd (Two Roads)
The Words in my Hand is the reimagined true story of Helena, a 17th century Dutch maid desperate to educate herself and use her mind in an era when women were kept firmly in their place. Helena works for an English bookseller who rents out a room to the mysterious ‘Monsieur’. On his arrival, ‘Monsieur’ turns out to be René Descartes. For all his learning, it is Helena he seeks out as she reveals the surprise in the everyday world that surrounds him. Descartes and Helena form an unlikely bond which turns from teaching into an affair. Weaving together the story of Descartes' quest for reason with Helena's struggle for literacy, The Words in my Hand follows Helena's journey across the Dutch Republic as she tries to keep their young daughter secret. Helena and Descartes’ worlds overlap yet remain sharply divided; the only way of being together is to live unseen. However, they soon face a terrible tragedy, and ultimately have to decide if their love is possible at all.
Guin Glasfurd's short fiction has appeared in Mslexia, the Scotsman and in a collection from The National Galleries of Scotland. The Words In My Hand was written with the support of a grant from Arts Council England. She also works collaboratively with artists in the UK and South Africa and her work has been funded under the Artists' International Development Fund, (Arts Council England and the British Council). She manages the Words and Women Twitterfeed, a voluntary organisation representing women writers in the East of England. She lives on the edge of the Fens, near Cambridge.
Judges: “Glasfurd brings the 17th century Netherlands to vivid life in this sensitive, compelling tale of love and loss.”
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber)
New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan Island, 1746. One rainy evening, a charming and handsome young stranger fresh off the boat from England pitches up to a counting-house in Golden Hill Street, with a suspicious yet compelling proposition – he has an order for a thousand pounds in his pocket that he wishes to cash. But can he be trusted? This is New York in its infancy, a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love, and find a world of trouble . . .
Francis Spufford was born in 1964. He is the author of five highly-praised books of non-fiction, the most recent of which, Unapologetic, has been translated into three languages, and the one before, Red Plenty, into nine. He has been longlisted or shortlisted for prizes in science writing, historical writing, political writing, theological writing and writing ‘evoking the spirit of place’. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge.
Judges: “This spirited, wonderfully witty novel sets sparkling characters and a lively plot against a richly-realised backdrop.”
For additional information please visit www.costabookawards.com.
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For further press information, please contact:
Amanda Johnson
Costa Book Awards Press and Publicity
Telephone: 07715 922 180 (mobile)
Email: [email protected]
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