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. 2014 marks the 43rd year of the Book Awards.
This year’s Costa Book Awards attracted 640 entries – the highest number of entries ever received in one year. Judges on this year’s panels (three per category) included writers Maggie O’Farrell, Elizabeth Buchan, Bernardine Evaristo and Wendy Moore, children’s author Jonathan Stroud, poet and author Owen Sheers and Radio 2 Book Club Producer, Joe Haddow.
Winners in the five categories, who each receive £5,000, will be announced on Monday 5th January 2015. The overall winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2014 will receive £30,000 and will be selected and announced at the Costa Book Awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 27th January 2015.
Christopher Rogers, Managing Director of Costa, commented, “What a fantastic selection of books. If people are looking for recommendations of what books to buy for Christmas this year, then they're all here. This list really demonstrates what a great year it's been for books - I can't wait to sit down and read them.”
The winner of the Costa Short Story Award, voted for by the public, will also be announced at the ceremony. The shortlisted six stories for the Costa Short Story Award, now in its third year, will be revealed on the Costa Book Awards website, www.costabookawards.com, on Tuesday 25th November 2014.
Since the introduction of the Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won eleven times by a novel, five times by a first novel, five times by a biography, seven times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book. The 2013 Costa Book of the Year was The Shock of the Fall by debut novelist Nathan Filer which has gone on to sell over 300, 000 copies to date across all formats.
To be eligible for the 2014 Costa Book Awards, books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland between 1 November 2013 and 31 October 2014 and their authors resident in the UK for the previous three years.
COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2014 SHORTLISTS
2014 Costa Novel Award shortlist
Neel Mukherjee for The Lives of Others (Chatto & Windus)
Monique Roffey for House of Ashes (Simon and Schuster)
Ali Smith for How to be both (Hamish Hamilton)
Colm Tóibín for Nora Webster (Viking)
2014 Costa First Novel Award shortlist
Carys Bray for A Song for Issy Bradley (Hutchinson)
Mary Costello for Academy Street (Canongate)
Emma Healey for Elizabeth is Missing (Viking)
Simon Wroe for Chop Chop (Viking)
2014 Costa Biography Award shortlist
John Campbell for Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (Jonathan Cape)
Marion Coutts for The Iceberg: A Memoir (Atlantic Books)
Helen Macdonald for H is for Hawk (Jonathan Cape)
Henry Marsh for Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
2014 Costa Poetry Award shortlist
Colette Bryce for The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (Picador)
Jonathan Edwards for My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren)
Lavinia Greenlaw for A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (Faber & Faber)
Kei Miller for The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet)
2014 Costa Children’s Book Award shortlist
Simon Mason for Running Girl (David Fickling Books/Random House Children’s Publishers)
Michael Morpurgo for Listen to the Moon (HarperCollins Children’s Books)
Kate Saunders for Five Children on the Western Front (Faber & Faber)
Marcus Sedgwick for The Ghosts of Heaven (Indigo)
How to be both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of several books including Hotel World, which was shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange Prize, and The Accidental which was shortlisted for both those prizes and won the Whitbread Novel Award. How to be both has just won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize.
Judges: “Dazzlingly imagined and daringly inventive, it’s both resonant and moving.”
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Jonathan Cape)
From the age of seven, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White’s tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White’s struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian and affiliate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Falcon (2006) and Shaler’s Fish (2001). H is for Hawk won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Judges: “A beautifully-layered memoir centred on nature and survival in superlative and original prose.”
The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus Sedgwick (Indigo)
The spiral has existed as long as time has existed. It's there when a girl walks through the forest, the green air clinging to her skin. There centuries later in a pleasant green dale, hiding the treacherous waters of Golden Beck that take Anna, who they call a witch. There on the other side of the world, where a mad poet watches the waves and knows the horrors they hide, and far into the future as Keir Bowman realises his destiny. Each takes their next step in life. None will ever go back to the same place. And so their journeys begin...
Marcus Sedgwick is a full-time author. His first novel, Floodland, won the Branford Boase Award for the Best Debut Children's Novel of 2000. Since then his books have been shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award, the Costa Children’s Book Award (2007), the Carnegie Medal and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. His previous novel, Midwinterblood, won the 2014 Michael L. Printz Award. He lives near Cambridge.
Judges: “A startlingly original novel with a strong conceptual link to the motif of a spiral. A hugely ambitious work.”
For additional information please visit www.costabookawards.com
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Amanda Johnson
Costa Book Awards Press and Publicity
Telephone: 07715 922 180 (mobile)
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @CostaBookAwards
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