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Press Release

11/28/2006
COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2006 SHORTLISTS ANNOUNCED

COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2006

SHORTLISTS ANNOUNCED

 

  • 580 entries for the first Costa Book Awards
  • 8 out of the 20 shortlisted books by first-time writers
  • Shortlists feature two former Whitbread Book of the Year winners
  • All-male Novel category shortlist

 

Costa, the UK's fastest-growing coffee shop chain, today announces the shortlists for the first ever Costa Book Awards 2006, in the First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book Award categories. 

 

The Costa Book Awards recognise the most enjoyable books of the last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland. 

 

Formerly known as the Whitbread Book Awards, Costa announced its takeover of the sponsorship of the UKs most prestigious book prize earlier this year. Fittingly, both Costa and the Book Awards are this year celebrating their 35th anniversary and this marks the first time that Costa has entered the sponsorship market.

 

John Derkach, Managing Director, Costa said: "Costa is excited to be announcing the first Costa Book Awards shortlists. The lists reflect the high calibre of writing and wide range of enjoyable books with which the Book Awards have become synonymous since they began back in 1971."

He continues: "The Book Awards have gone from strength to strength over the past 35 years to become one of the UK's most popular, highly-respected and prestigious awards and we at Costa look forward to building on this heritage."

 

This year's Costa Book Awards attracted 580 entries, the highest number of entries ever received in one year since the Book Awards began and a 21% increase from 2005 (476 entries). Each category's shortlist was chosen by a panel of three judges, including author and broadcaster Kate Adie; authors Mike Gayle, Sophie Kinsella and Adle Geras, and writer and broadcaster on language, Susie Dent from Countdown's Dictionary Corner.

 

Winners in the five categories, who each receive 5,000, will be announced on Wednesday 10th January 2007.  The overall winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2006 will receive 25,000 and will be selected and announced at the Costa Book Awards ceremony in central London on Wednesday 7th February 2007.

 

Since the introduction of the Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won seven times by a novel, three times by a first novel, five times by a biography, five times by a collection of poetry and once by a children's book.  The 2005 Book of the Year was won by Hilary Spurling for Matisse: the Master.

 

To be eligible for the 2006 Costa Book Awards, books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland between 1st November 2005 and 31st October 2006.

 

Full details of the shortlists follow. 

 

For additional information please visit www.costabookawards.com.

 

COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2006 SHORTLISTS

 

2006 Costa Novel Award shortlist

Restless by William Boyd (Bloomsbury)

Saving Caravaggio by Neil Griffiths (Viking)

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon (Jonathan Cape)

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Sceptre)

 

2006 Costa First Novel Award shortlist

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox (John Murray)

Cloth Girl by Marilyn Heward Mills (Little, Brown)

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (Quercus)

The Amnesia Clinic by James Scudamore (Harvill Secker)

 

 

2006 Costa Biography Award shortlist

George Mackay Brown: The Life by Maggie Fergusson (John Murray)

Donne: A Reformed Soul by John Stubbs (Viking)

Nabeels Song by Jo Tatchell (Sceptre)

Keeping Mum by Brian Thompson (Atlantic Books)

 

 

2006 Costa Poetry Award shortlist

The Book of Blood by Vicki Feaver (Jonathan Cape)

Letter to Patience by John Haynes (Seren)

District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (Faber and Faber)

Dear Room by Hugo Williams (Faber and Faber)

 

 

2006 Costa Children's Book Award shortlist

Clay by David Almond (Hodder Childrens Books)

The Diamond of Drury Lane by Julia Golding (Egmont Press)

Just in Case by Meg Rosoff (Puffin)

Set in Stone by Linda Newbery (David Fickling Books)

 

 


 

Shortlist for the 2006 Costa Novel Award

(134 entries)

 

Judges

Kate Adie     Author and Broadcaster

Susie Dent   Writer and Broadcaster on Language

Mike Gayle    Author and Journalist

 

Restless by William Boyd (Bloomsbury)

During the long, hot summer of 1976, Ruth Gilmartin discovers that her very English mother Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian migre and one-time spy. In 1939, Eva is a beautiful 28-year-old living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious, patrician Englishman. Under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one.

 

William Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana and is the author of eight previous novels, many of which have won prizes - including A Good Man in Africa which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1981. A former television critic for the New Statesman, Boyd is also a scriptwriter.  Some thirteen of his screenplays have been filmed and in 1998 he both wrote and directed the feature film, The Trench. William Boyd lives in London and was awarded the CBE in 2005.

 

Judges:  Beautifully crafted. Boyd gives us a page-turner, despite the storys complex wartime intrigue.  Restless is packed with riveting detail: it is a novel reeking of authenticity.

 

Saving Caravaggio by Neil Griffiths (Viking)

Under a searing Calabrian sky, market traders son turned art theft detective Daniel Wright is shown the worlds most famous stolen painting Caravaggios Nativity. As a Caravaggio lover and expert in art recovery, he is determined to rescue it from the mafia bosses who use it as payment for drug deals and assassinations. Risking his marriage, his career and his life, Daniel defies his superiors and goes beyond the law with the help of Uffizi Gallery curator Francesca Natali in a desperate bid to save the Caravaggio before it is lost forever. 

 

Neil Griffiths was born in 1965. His first novel, Betrayal in Naples, published in 2004, won the Authors Best First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Pendleton May Award and the Waverton Good Read. Neil lives in London and works as a senior partner for a broadcast research company. He also writes for radio and film.

 

Judges:  A powerful and discomforting story of one mans obsession and its consequences.  A thriller with real momentum and atmospheric force.

 

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon (Jonathan Cape)

George Hall is 57 and settling down to a comfortable retirement.   But then he runs into a spot of bother.  That red circular rash on his hip:  George convinces himself its skin cancer.  Then his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that her deeply inappropriate boyfriend, Ray, will become her second husband. The planning for these nuptials proves a great inconvenience to Georges wife, Jean, who is carrying on a late-life affair with her husbands ex-colleague.  The way these damaged people fall apart and come together as a family is the true subject of Haddons hilarious and disturbing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

 

Mark Haddon is an author, illustrator and screenwriter who has written fifteen books for children and won numerous prizes, including two BAFTAs. His novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, was a bestseller around the world, winning more than seventeen literary awards including the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.  His first collection of poems, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, was published in 2005. Mark lives in Oxford with his wife and two children.

 

Judges:  An absolute pleasure to read, with a lightness of touch overlaying real insight into chaotic family life.

 

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Sceptre)

It is 1982 in the Worcestershire village of Black Swan Green and thirteen-year old Jason Taylor is afraid. He is afraid of the cottage in the woods, he is afraid that his parents will break up, but most of all he is afraid of the hangman. The hangman is the spidery creature who creeps into his mouth and makes him stammer when he gets nervous.    As his stammer threatens to make him the most unpopular boy in the school, Jason takes secret delight in nature, words and his own vivid imagination. Mitchell sets Jasons struggles against the background of the Falklands war, the miners strike and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Just as Jasons life is rapidly changing, so is the country in which he lives.

 

David Mitchell was born in 1969 and grew up in Worcestershire. His first novel, Ghostwritten, published in 1999, won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award while his second, number9dream, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His third novel, Cloud Atlas, won numerous prizes including the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year category in the British Book Awards. David recently moved from Ireland to live in Japan with his wife and two children.

 

Judges:  A telling and touching account of a vanishing childhood, with all its impossibilities and its comedies.

 


 

Shortlist for the 2006 Costa First Novel Award

(90 entries)

 

Judges

Alyson Rudd                                          Times Writer

Sophie Kinsella                                      Author

Andrew McClellan                                   Fiction Buyer, WH Smith

 

 

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox (John Murray)

 

Edward Glyver has always believed that he is destined for greatness. When he discovers that he is in fact the lost son of Lord Tansor of Evenwood and the rightful heir to the Duport familys immense fortune, he embarks on a quest to prove his identity and reclaim the life that should be his.  From the seedy depths of London, to the venerable institution of Eton, to the magnificent estate of Evenwood, Edward Glyvers pursuit of vindication and revenge leads him into every layer of Victorian England.

 

Michael Cox was born in Northamptonshire in 1948. After graduating from Cambridge in 1971, he went into the rock music business as a songwriter and recording artist. After releasing three successful albums, Michael left the music business and went into publishing. He is the author of a biography of the scholar and ghost-story writer M.R. James, and the editor of The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories and The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories.  Michael lives in rural Northamptonshire.

 

Judges: Michael Coxs recreation of the underbelly of Victorian high society brings a great revenge tale to life.  It is a powerful achievement of research, style and plotting.

 

Cloth Girl by Marilyn Heward Mills (Little, Brown)

Matilda Quartey is 14 years old when sophisticated black Gold Coast lawyer Robert Bannerman sets eyes on her and resolves to take her for his second wife.  For Julie, his first wife, this is a colossal slap in the face that she is not willing to tolerate.  On the other side of the colony, Audrey Turton, wife of the new ADC to the Governor, is appalled by her life in Africa, where the reality has borne no relation to her dream of glamour and adventure.  Angry, flirtatious and reckless, she drinks away the days, dreaming of home leave and waiting for something to happen. 

 

Marilyn Heward Mills was born in Basle, in Switzerland.  Her mother is Swiss, her father a Ghanaian barrister and she lived in Ghana until the age of 19.  After a gap year in Switzerland, she moved to England to study Law at Durham University and passed law exams at Chester Law School and the New York State Bar. She moved to London in 1992 where she practised law for 12 years specialising as an employment solicitor.  She now lives in Dulwich with her husband and two children. 

 

Judges:  Cloth Girl is remarkably self-assured for a first novel.  It brings the gold coast of Africa and the pre-War colonial world to life it is warm, vibrant and moving.

 

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (Quercus)

1867, Canada. As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a seventeen-year-old boy disappears.  Tracks leaving the dead mans cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond.  In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township journalists, Hudsons Bay Company men, trappers, traders but do they want to solve the crime, or exploit it?

 

Stef Penney grew up in Edinburgh. After a degree in Philosophy and Theology from Bristol University and a variety of jobs in this country and abroad, she turned to film-making.  She made three short films before studying Film and TV in Bournemouth and on graduation was selected for the Carlton Television New Writers Scheme.  Stef is 37 and lives in East London.

 

Judges:  The Tenderness of Wolves is atmospheric, gripping and compassionate and perfectly evokes the snowy wastes of nineteenth century Canada. 

 

The Amnesia Clinic by James Scudamore (Harvill Secker)

In Quitos new town, Anti, son of British ex-pats, befriends a classmate; the charismatic and popular Fabin.  An orphan, Fabin lives with his uncle Suarez, a flamboyant lawyer and storyteller extraordinaire.  Inspired by Suarez, the two boys impress each other with their wildly imaginative storytelling.  But when details surrounding the death of Fabins parents begin to emerge, Anti decides to console his friend with a story suggesting that Fabins mother may be alive and living at a bizarre hospital on the coast for patients with memory loss.  The boys embark on a quixotic voyage across Ecuador in search of an Amnesia Clinic that may, or may not, exist.

 

James Scudamore was born in 1976.  After a childhood spent variously in Japan, Brazil, Ecuador and the UK, he read Modern Languages at Oxford University.  He then worked in advertising for four years before taking an MA in Creative Writing at the UEA. The Amnesia Clinic has been shortlisted for the EDS Dylan Thomas Prize and the Glen Dimplex Fiction Award.  James lives in London.

 

Judges:  This delightful book about the friendship between two boys in Ecuador is full of tall tales and fantasy.  The line between reality and bizarre fiction is always blurred, always mesmerising.

 

 

 

Shortlist for the 2006 Costa Biography Award

(149 entries)

 

Judges

Hazel Broadfoot                                     Co-Owner, Village Books (Dulwich)

Sean OHagan                                        Writer, The Observer

Francis Wheen                                       Author and Biographer

 

George Mackay Brown: The Life by Maggie Fergusson (John Murray)

 

George Mackay Brown was one of Scotlands greatest twentieth-century writers, but in person a bundle of paradoxes.  He had a wide international reputation, but hardly left his native Orkney.  A prolific poet, he was also an accomplished novelist and a master of the short story.  When he died on 13th April 1996, he left behind an autobiography as deft as it is ultimately uninformative. 

 

Maggie Fergusson studied History at Oxford and spent a short time working in the City.  She then moved into journalism and has written for newspapers and magazines including The Daily Telegraph, Harpers & Queen and the Independent magazine, and is Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature.  It was a commission by The Times that first led her to Orkney and George Mackay Brown. She is married with two daughters and lives in London.  This is her first book.  

 

Judges:  Maggie Fergussons extraordinary biography illuminates the life of a neglected genius and the place that inspired him.  Even if youre unfamiliar with George Mackay Brown, its a captivating read.

 

 

Donne: A Reformed Soul by John Stubbs (Viking)

Following Donne through calm and storm, from Plague-ridden streets to the palaces of the English Renaissance, from the taverns and theatres on the Bankside to the pulpit of St Pauls, John Stubbss biography is a vivid,  dazzling portrait of an extraordinary writer and his country at a time of bewildering and cruel transformation.

 

John Stubbs was born in Leicestershire in 1977 and studied English at Oxford and Renaissance Literature.  He worked on his biography of Donne while living in Cambridge and writing his PhD, a study of farfetched things in Shakespeare. Donne: The Reformed Soul, his first book, won a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award as a work in progress in 2004, and was published in August 2006.

 

Judges: A vivid portrait of John Donne and his world: the religious turmoil, political intrigues, the sex and the violence.  A majestic read and everything you want from a literary biography.

 

Nabeels Song by Jo Tatchell (Sceptre)

Nabeels Song is an epic true story of one familys experience of life before, during and after the rgime of Saddam Hussein.   Nabeel Yasin had an ordinary childhood in a middle-class neighbourhood in 1950s Baghdad.  He showed an early gift for poetry and as a young man became famous for it.  But by the end of the 1970s, Saddams rise to power was encroaching on his life, and that of his family.  Nabeels Song is the story of family life in Iraq during one of the most turbulent and brutal times in the countrys history.

 

Jo Tatchell is a journalist who has spent many years in the Middle East and Arab countries.  She writes on Middle Eastern culture for UK and US media including The Guardian and Prospect magazine.  She  now lives in the Wiltshire. This is her first book.

 

Judges: After the most dramatic opening of any of the books on the shortlist, Nabeels Song evokes the lost world of Iraq before Saddam, as well as the terrors that ensued.  This beautifully-written book reminds us that poetry is stronger than tyranny.

 

Keeping Mum by Brian Thompson (Atlantic Books)

Mum and Dad - Squibs and Bert were a complete mystery to Brian Thompson as he grew up in Cambridge and London during the 1940s. His mother danced with the Yanks all night and slept under a fake fur coat all day.  When his father bothered to come home he resolutely discouraged Brian in everything.  Other children were evacuated out of the big cities, but Brian found himself travelling into the capital.  He spent much of the Blitz with an eccentric swarm of relations whose geography was the street, the pub, the market and two or three useful tramlines.  Brian was snatched from his working-class roots by the Butler Act of 1944 and given an education that would lead to Cambridge University, books, pipe-smoking and rose trellises.  

 

Brian Thompson was born in Lambeth, London in 1935. He undertook national service in Kenya and taught in secondary and adult education for 15 years. Since 1973 he has written for a living as a radio and television playwright and documentary film-maker.  He is also the author of several acclaimed biographies and seven stage plays.   He currently lives in Oxford.

 

Judges: From a loveless wartime childhood comes a generous and loveable memoir written from a childs-eye view. Utterly lacking in self-pity, its laugh-out-loud funny.


 

Shortlist for the 2006 Costa Poetry Award

(75 entries)

 

Judges

Elaine Feinstein   Poet and Author

Jeremy Noel-Tod     Critic and Editor

(Dr) Deryn Rees-Jones    Writer

 

The Book of Blood by Vicki Feaver (Jonathan Cape)

Split between dark and light, this book records the dichotomy of human experience with unflinching force and clarity. It deals with break-up, depression, illness and death. But it also reveals an intense involvement with nature and a capacity for healing and love.   Set in a territory which connects child with adult, myth with reality, the personal with the universal, the book shows a poet fully open to the richness and possibilities of the world but also aware of its violence and pain, not as a remote observer but as someone who is a part of it.

 

Vicki Feaver was born in Nottingham in 1943 and educated at Durham University and University College, London.  She has published two previous collections, Close Relatives (1981) and The Handless Maiden (1994) which won the Heinemann Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection that year.  In 1993 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and in 1999 a Cholmondeley Award.  She is a former tutor of Creative Writing at University College, Chichester, and now lives in South Lanarkshire, Scotland.  

Judges: Fierce poems with striking imagery and fine control of pace and tone.

 

Letter to Patience by John Haynes (Seren)

Set in Patiences Parlour, a small mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria, at a time of political unrest, Letter to Patience is a vividly atmospheric book-length poem divided into cantos.  The letter writer is in Britain, where he has returned with his Nigerian wife and children to nurse his dying father.  The poem is not only a biography, or an essay on post-colonialism, it is an epic portrayal of a beautiful and troubled country and of one mans search for meaning in difficult times.

John Haynes spent 1970 to 1988 as a lecturer in English at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria where he founded the literary journal, Saiwa.  Now back in the UK, he has continued teaching, writing and publishing and is the author of a number of books: on teaching, on style and language theory, on African poetry, stories for African children, as well as two other volumes of verse.  He has won prizes in the Arvon and National Poetry Competitions.

 

Judges: A vivid, thoughtful and multi-faceted verse-letter, which moves skilfully between life in post-colonial Nigeria and England.

 

District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (Faber and Faber)

District and Circle starts in an age of bare hands and cast iron and ends as the automatic lock/clunk shuts in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century.  In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory.

 

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland.  Death of a Naturalist, his first collection, appeared in 1966, and since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations which have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation.  In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  District and Circle is his twelfth collection of poems, and his first new collection for five years.

 

Judges: Elegiac and contemporary haunting and haunted poems of immense intelligence and freshness.

 

Dear Room by Hugo Williams (Faber and Faber)

Dear Room is successor to Billys Rain (1999), whose preoccupations and occasions it continues and ramifies, charting the angles, signals, orders, murmurs, sighs of love, separation and loss.  With grave good humour, ruefully tactful timing and a scruple reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, these poems register the goodbye look of things, and ponder the difference between a good memory and an inability to forget. 

 

Hugo Williams was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex.  He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, since when he has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer.  He has been TV critic on the New Statesman, theatre critic on the Sunday Correspondent and film critic for Harpers & Queen.  He writes the Freelance column in the Times Literary Supplement and lives in London.  Billys Rain won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1999.  His Collected Poems was published by Faber in 2002.

 

Judges: Elegantly crafted poems which have an emotional narrative that is both wistful and raw.


 

Shortlist for the 2006 Costa Childrens Book Award (132 entries)

 

Judges

Geraldine Brennan -Books Editor, TES

Adle Geras - Novelist and Childrens Writer

Brian Pattinson -Proprieter, The Book House (Thame)

Nancy Netherwood (Young Judge)  - CBBC Newsround, Presspacker

Nathan Sutton (Young Judge) - CBBC Newsround, Presspacker

 

Clay by David Almond (Hodder Childrens Books)

Davie and his mate Geordie are altar boys in the former pit village of Felling-On-Tyne.  They dream of exacting revenge on the bully Mouldy and his gang.  When new boy Stephen Rose arrives, he seems to be the answer to Davies prayers.  Stephen has been ejected from a seminary and pulls Davie into his strange world creating tiny figures from clay and breathing life into them.  As Davie and Stephen grow closer, they create a monster to defeat Mouldy once and for all

 

David Almond studied English at the University of East Anglia.  Stints in various jobs hotel porter, postman, labourer preceded Davids training as a teacher.  Five years later, he resigned from his job to take up writing full-time and went to live in a commune in Norfolk.  His first novel, Skellig, won the Whitbread Childrens Book Award in 1998, has been translated into 26 languages and in 2003, was developed into a theatrical production staged in Londons Young Vic theatre.  David now lives in Northumberland with his wife and daughter.

 

Judges: Clay is a powerful, moving and unusual story which works on every level.  It is beautifully and plainly written, and comes straight from the heart.

 

 

The Diamond of Drury Lane by Julia Golding (Egmont Press)

Cat Royal is an orphan who lives at the back of the theatre in Drury Lane. She mingles with the high and low of society, from the actors onstage to the lords and ladies in the stalls to the barrow boys in the grimy marketplace. Set in 1790's Covent Garden, The Diamond of a Drury Lane whisks you back to a bygone era.  Featuring a colourful cast of characters, fast-paced action, thrilling special effects and moments of hilarious comedy, it is a fantastic spectacle and a gripping mystery.

 

Julia Golding grew up on the edge of Epping Forest. After reading English at Cambridge, she joined the Foreign Office and served in Poland.  On leaving Poland, she exchanged diplomacy for academia and took a doctorate at Oxford in The Literature of the English Romantic Period.  She then joined Oxfam as a lobbyist on conflict issues, campaigning at the UN and with governments to lessen the impact of conflict on civilians living in war zones.  Married with three children, Julia now lives in Oxford and works as a freelance writer.  This is her first novel.

 

Judges: A rollicking 18th century theatrical romp with a fantastically feisty heroine.

 

Just in Case by Meg Rosoff (Puffin)

The day David Case saves his brother's life, his whole world changes. Suddenly, every moment is fizzing with significance, full of what ifs? He must hide; become an entirely new person to escape Fate... if he can. Will changing his name, befriending an astrophysicist and gaining an imaginary pet be enough? Bewildered and obsessive, he'll try anything to survive. Just in Case is a daring, powerful and compelling read bringing the spirit of the film Donnie Darko to the heart of middle England.

 

Meg Rosoff was born and brought up in Boston and went to Harvard University. After a year studying sculpture in London, she returned to the US and lived in New York for the next ten years working in publishing and advertising.  Her first novel, How I Live Now, was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Childrens Book Award and won the Guardian and Branford Boase Awards. She lives in London with her husband, the painter Paul Hamlyn, and her daughter, Gloria.

 

Judges: A razor-sharp portrait of a teenage boy and his relationship with his image, his inner life and fate itself.

 

Set in Stone by Linda Newbery (David Fickling Books)

When nave and impressionable artist Samuel Godwin accepts the position of tutor to the daughters of wealthy Ernest Farrow, he does not suspect that hes walking into a web of deception.  He is drawn to the lives of the three young women who live at Fourwinds: Charlotte Agnew, the governess; demure Julianna, the elder daughter; and younger sister, Marianne, passionate, wilful and erratic.  Yet its not only the people who entrance Samuel.  The house, Fourwinds, is an inspiring piece of architecture that looms large in the lives of those who encounter it. It is not long before Samuel and Charlotte uncover secrets that are both horrifying and dangerous to all...

 

Linda Newbery was born in 1952 and brought up in Romford, Essex.  The author of more than twenty books for children and adults, Linda also reviews fiction for the Times Educational Supplement and other publications, and tutors courses for writers of all ages.   Linda lives with her husband and three cats in rural Northamptonshire.

 

Judges: A novel of intrigue and deception.  Newberys landscape is a joy to walk into.

 

-ends-

 

 

For further press information, author pictures and book jacket images, please contact:

 

Amanda Johnson

Costa Book Awards Press and Publicity

Telephone: 020 7806 5495 (direct line) or 07715 922180 (mobile)

Email:  Amanda.Johnson@whitbread.com

 

 

 

Notes for Editors:

 

1. The Costa Book Awards, formerly the Whitbread Book Awards, were established in 1971 to encourage, promote and celebrate the best contemporary British writing.

 

2. The total prize fund for the Costa Book Awards stands at ?50,000. The award winners from the five categories - Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Childrens Book - each receive ?5,000.

 

3. The overall Costa Book of the Year is selected from the five category Award winners with the winner receiving a further ?25,000.  The winner will be announced at the awards ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel, central London on 7th February, 2007.

 

About Costa:

Founded by Italian brothers Sergio and Bruno Costa in 1971, Costa is the UKs market-leading coffee shop brand. With over 480 Costa stores in the UK and 145 stores overseas, Costa has enjoyed a remarkable period of growth since it opened its first store and is now the UKs fastest growing coffee business.

 

As pioneers of caf culture in the UK, Costa inspired the creation of popular and convenient concessions stores in locations such as Waterstones and WH Smiths bookstores, and BAA outlets.  A welcome respite for shoppers to relax, unwind and enjoy a revitalising cup of coffee crafted the Italian way.

 

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