Press
Press Release
11/18/2008
Costa Book Awards 2008 Shortlists announced
* Record number of entries submitted to this year's Awards (616)
*
Debut writer pitted against nonagenarian in the Biography category
* Lawyer
and scientist go head-to-head in the First Novel category
* All-male Novel
category shortlist
19.30pm, Tuesday 18th November, London: Costa, the UK's fastest-growing
coffee shop chain, today announces the shortlists for the 2008 Costa Book
Awards.
The Costa Book Awards recognise the most enjoyable books in five categories -
First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book - published in the
last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland.
Originally established in 1971 by Whitbread Plc, Costa announced its takeover
of the sponsorship of the UK's most prestigious book prize in 2006.
This
year's Costa Book Awards attracted 616 entries - the highest-ever number of
submissions in one year. Judges on this year's panels (three per category)
included author Lisa Jewell; actress and writer Pauline McLynn; journalist,
writer and broadcaster Michael Buerk; poet and broadcaster Roger McGough CBE;
and writer Victoria Hislop. Three young judges, selected by a competition
run in UK Costa stores and online at www.costabookawards.com, joined the
Children's Book Award panel.
Winners in the five categories, who each receive £5,000, will be announced on
Tuesday 6th January 2009. The overall winner of the Costa Book of the Year
2008 will receive £25,000 and will be selected and announced at the Costa Book
Awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 27th January 2009.
Since the introduction of the Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won
eight times by a novel, four 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
2007 Costa Book of the Year was won by A L Kennedy for Day.
To be eligible for the 2008 Costa Book Awards, books must have been first
published in the UK or Ireland between 1 November 2007 and 31 October 2008.
Full details of the shortlists follow.
For additional information please visit www.costabookawards.com.
COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2008 SHORTLISTS:
See http://www.costabookawards.co.uk/awards/thisyearshortlist2008.aspx
Shortlist for the 2008 Costa Novel Award
(144 entries)
Judges
Dan Fenton Director, John Sandoe
(Bookshop) Limited
Pauline McLynn Actress and
Writer
Matthew Sweet Writer and Broadcaster
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Faber and
Faber)
Roseanne McNulty, perhaps nearing her 100th birthday - no
one is quite sure - faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental
Hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure.
Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her
psychiatrist Dr Grene. Told through their respective journals, the story that
emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of
memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret, history
of Ireland.
Sebastian Barry is a playwright and novelist who was born in
Dublin in 1955. His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998),
Annie Dunne (2002) and A Long Long Way (2005), which was shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize and the Dublin International Impac Prize. He has won many
awards including the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle
Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize. Barry lives in Wicklow with his
wife and three children.
Judges: "A heartbreaking and lyrical tale of
loss, betrayal and redemption."
The Other Hand by Chris Cleave
(Sceptre)
Little Bee is a 16-year-old African girl; Sarah is a magazine editor
living in Kingston-upon-Thames; Charlie is her 4-year-old son but will only
answer to ?Batman'. The Other Hand tells how their lives intertwine and was
inspired by the author's early childhood in West Africa and a visit to a
detention centre in Essex.
Chris Cleave's debut novel Incendiary was an
international bestseller in 20 countries, winning critical acclaim around the
world and prizes including the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, the United States
Book-of-the-Month Club's First Fiction award 2005 and the Prix Special du Jury
at the French Prix des Lecteurs 2007. Its subject matter, a terrorist attack on
London, proved all too prescient when it was published in the UK on 7th July
2005. It will be released later this year as a major motion picture. He is
married with two children, and lives in London.
Judges: "A richly
original novel full of shocks and wonders."
A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernieres (Harvill
Secker)
Chris is bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless
marriage. In his forties, he's a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London,
a stranger to himself on the night he invites a hooker into his car. Roza is
Yugoslavian, recently moved to London, the daughter of one of Tito's partisans.
She's in her twenties, but has already lived a life filled with danger,
misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And though she's not a hooker, when she's
propositioned by Chris, she gets into his car anyway. Over the next few
months Roza tells Chris the stories of her past. But is Roza telling the truth?
Does Chris hear the stories through the filter of his own need? Does it even
matter?
Louis de Bernieres was selected as one of the Granta Twenty Best
of Young British Novelists in 1993. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, his fourth
novel, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book, 1995, selling 2.8 million
copies. Since then he's published two more novels, Red Dog (2001) and
Birds Without Wings which was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Novel
Award.
Judges: "An elegant love story about the lies we tell
ourselves and why we have to."
Trauma by Patrick McGrath (Bloomsbury)
Charlie Weir
is a man who tackles other people's demons for a living. He has seen every kind
of trauma during his years as a psychiatrist in New York City, and yet hasn't
found a way to resolve the conflicts within his own family. And he has never
overcome the terrible blunder seven years before which lost him his wife and
daughter, leaving him prone to corrosive loneliness and restless anger.
When Walt introduces Charlie to Nora Chiara, they fall for each other quickly
but their bliss is short-lived. Her vulnerability, once so irresistible, begins
to sour their life together. As he probes at the source of her distress, a
half-memory from deep in his own unconscious mind begins to arouse a horrifying
suspicion...
Patrick McGrath is the author of a short story collection,
and six previous novels including Asylum, Martha Peake, Port Mungo and Spider
which was made into a film in 2002 by acclaimed director David Cronenberg. His
most recent book was Ghost Town, a volume of novellas about New York. Patrick
McGrath lives in London and New York.
Judges: "A riveting story about
what makes us who we are by a truly accomplished
novelist."
Shortlist for the 2008 Costa First Novel
Award
(112 entries)
Judges
Sarah Broadhurst Book Reviewer
Lisa
Jewell Author
Chris Rushby
Buying Director, Bertrams/THE
The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams (Virago)
From
her lookout on the first floor, Ginny watches and waits for her younger sister
Vivien to return to the crumbling mansion that was once their idyllic childhood
home. Vivien has not set foot in the house since she left forty-seven years ago;
Ginny, the reclusive moth expert, has rarely ventured outside it. Selling
off the family furniture over the years, she has gradually shut off each wing of
the house. Only the attic remains untouched. There, collected over several
generations, the walls are lined with pinned and preserved moths?. With Vivien's
arrival, long-forgotten memories are stirred up, and the secrets that have
separated the sisters threaten to disrupt much more than Ginny's carefully
ordered world.
Poppy Adams, aged 34, is a film-maker who has
made films for the BBC, Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel. She has a degree in
Natural Sciences and lives in London with her husband and three
children.
Judges: "Menacing, compelling and beautifully
written."
The Outcast by Sadie Jones (Chatto & Windus)
1957
and Lewis Aldridge is travelling back to his home in the South of England. He is
straight out of jail and nineteen years old. His return will trigger the
implosion not just of his family, but of a whole community. A decade earlier,
his father's homecoming takes a different shape. The war is over and Gilbert has
recently been demobbed. He reverts easily to suburban life, but his wife and
young son resist the stuffy routine. Lewis and his mother escape to the woods
for picnics, just as they did in the wartime days. Nobody is surprised that
Gilbert's wife counters convention, but they are all shocked when, after one of
their jaunts, Lewis comes back without her.
Sadie Jones was born in
London and grew up in a creative environment: her father is the Jamaican poet
Evan Jones, and her mother was an actress. She worked in a variety of jobs
including video production, temping and as a waitress. After travelling in
America, the Caribbean and Mexico, Sadie moved to Paris where she taught English
and wrote her first screenplay. She settled in London and spent several years as
a screenwriter before writing The Outcast. Sadie is married to the architect Tim
Boyd and has two children.
Judges: "The repressive society of
ordinary people is elegantly portrayed in an assured novel of great
note."
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (Simon &
Schuster)
Amidst the all-pervading fear of Stalinist Russia, an
officer must toe the Party Line. Leo Demidov is the perfect soldier
of the regime: he dismisses the horrific death of a young boy because there can
be no murder in Communist Russia. But his confidence in the all-pervading
doctrines of the Party is shaken when first he witnesses a man he knows to be
innocent being brutally tortured?and is then told to arrest his own
wife. Leo knows how the State works. He faces a stark choice:
his wife or his life. And still the killings of children
continue?
Tom Rob Smith was born in 1979 to a Swedish mother and an
English father and was brought up in London where he still lives. He
graduated from Cambridge in 2001 and spent a year in Italy on a creative writing
scholarship. Tom has worked as a screenwriter for the past five years,
including a six-month stint in Phnom Penh story-lining Cambodia's first-ever
soap.
Judges: "This gripping, unputdownable thriller is
an exciting new addition to the genre."
Inside the Whale by Jennie Rooney (Chatto & Windus)
Stevie must tell her family the truth - but the past is complicated.
First there was her Mum who developed an anxious streak after marrying the wrong
Reg, then there was the man from the dairy who taught Stevie to swim and broke
her heart. Then four years of war came and it's not until Stevie meets Jonathan
that she finally starts to feel safety. Meanwhile, Michael's memories are
squashed into a shoebox ready for his move into hospital. Years ago, he trained
military carrier pigeons for the Royal Corps in Cairo yet his own homecoming has
taken a lifetime. Michael has never been good at putting things into words
but Anna, a young healthcare worker, has the patience to eke out his story.
Jennie Rooney was born in Liverpool in 1980. She read History at the
University of Cambridge and taught English in France before moving to London to
work as a lawyer.
Judges: "This perfectly-formed debut novel is
gentle, perceptive and moving."
Shortlist for the 2008 Costa Biography Award (135
entries)
Judges
Michael Buerk Journalist, Writer
and Broadcaster
Peter Saxton Biography Buyer,
Waterstones
Marilyn Warnick Books Editor, Mail on
Sunday
Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill
(Granta)
Looking back on a life well lived and the stories,
events and relationships that have peppered it, Athill offers original and
lively reflections on the lessons she has learned - lessons that will strike a
universal chord with readers in any stage of life. Never less than vivid and
frank, she writes with intimate honesty about friendship, love, sex, and sore
feet. Somewhere Towards the End addresses what it means to be old and to face
death every day, but still have the strength to strive for life with an
unquenchable curiosity for all that it brings.
Diana Athill was born in
1917. She worked for the BBC throughout the Second World War and helped
establish the publishing company Andr? Deutsch. She has written five volumes of
memoir including the highly-acclaimed Stet, and one novel, all published by
Granta Books. She lives in London.
Judges: "A graceful, clear-sighted
and brave memoir entirely lacking in self-pity - this is a wise and wry take on
exactly what it's like to grow old."
Bloomsbury Ballerina by Judith Mackrell (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson)
Lydia Lopokova was born in St Petersburg in 1891. Just
five feet tall and a natural comedian, her vivacious personality and sheer force
of charm propelled her to the top of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Through a
combination of luck, determination and talent, Lydia became a star in Paris, a
vaudeville favourite in America, the toast of Britain and then, unexpectedly,
married the world-renowned economist and formerly homosexual, John Maynard
Keynes. Lydia's story is an extraordinary one especially as she refused all
requests to write her memoirs in her lifetime.
Judith Mackrell has been
the Guardian's dance critic since 1995. She has also written for the
Independent, Vogue and the Literary Review, among others, and has broadcast
regularly on television and radio. She was the ghostwriter for Darcey Bussell's
Life in Dance and lives in London with her husband and two
sons.
Judges: "The vividly-described, extraordinary life of the
lively and eccentric ballerina who was drawn by Picasso, loathed by the
Bloomsbury set and adored by her husband, John Maynard Keynes."
If You Don't Know Me By Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in
Wolverhampton by Sathnam Sanghera (Viking)
When Sathnam Sanghera
was twenty-four years old he made a discovery about his family that would darken
but also illuminate his life. The discovery would set the author on a journey
into his family's past: from his father's harsh life in rural Punjab, to his
parent's early years in England; from his mother's extraordinary resilience as
she brought up a family in a foreign land, to the author's happy memories of his
childhood. This discovery would also finally force Sanghera's own secret life
into the glaring spotlight which he had, for fear of family rejection, kept
hidden from his beloved mother in the Midlands.
Sathnam Sanghera was born
in 1976. He is an award-winning journalist who, until recently, was Chief
Feature Writer at The Financial Times. He now works for The Times and lives in
London. This is his first book.
Judges: "Quietly witty, engrossing
and tragicomic - this insight into parallel culture in Britain today is the
poignant story of an exceptional family that everyone should read."
Chagall by Jackie Wullschlager (Allen Lane)
Born the
son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive
?potato-coloured' czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris.
Through war and revolution, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in
paintings which are considered among the most humane and joyful of the 20th
century. With access to hundreds of hitherto unseen and unpublished
letters from the Chagall family collection and drawing on numerous interviews
with the artists family, friends, dealers and collectors, Wullschlager creates a
full and true account of Chagall the man and the artist - and of a life as
intense and haunting as his paintings.
Jackie Wullschlager is Chief Art
Critic of the Financial Times. Her biography of Hans Christian Andersen
was published to acclaim in 2000 and is now considered the standard life of the
writer.
Judges: "Not just the artist's life and his work but a
chronicle of the shattering events of the 20th century. Great scholarship,
enlightening observations about the paintings and an engaging style - we
couldn't put it down."
Shortlist for the 2008 Costa Poetry Award (100
entries)
Judges
Rachel Campbell-Johnston Art Critic, The
Times
Roger McGough CBE Poet and Broadcaster
Robyn
Marsack Director, Scottish Poetry Library
For All We Know by Ciaran Carson (Gallery
Books)
Shortly after a man and a woman meet for the first time in
a second-hand clothes shop in Belfast, a bomb goes off. It is some time in the
1970s. They become lovers. For All We Know is their story, told in the recent
past: a meditation on love, place, memory, loss and language, how people know
each other, misunderstand each other, or translate each other, not to mention
the events and circumstances which are beyond their control.
Ciaran
Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast, where he still lives and is Professor of
Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University. His
books of poems have earned praise and prizes all over the world, including the
Irish Times Award for Poetry, the inaugural T S Eliot Prize and the Forward
Prize. For All We Know has been shortlisted for this year's T S Eliot
Prize.
Judges: "The voices in this film noir poem - confident,
seductive and hypnotic - draw the reader into a tragic, complex and dream-like
love story."
The Broken Word by Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape)
The
Broken Word is a delicate and powerful poetic sequence that charts a young man's
progress through a dark period in British colonial history - the Mau Mau
uprisings in Kenya. With language and imagery that feels utterly contemporary,
and subject matter - tribal violence and subsequent retribution - that seems
almost Homeric, Foulds gives the narrative all the febrile energy of classical
drama, re-charged and re-imagined.
Adam Foulds was born in 1974 and lives
in South London. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University
of East Anglia and his poetry has appeared in a number of literary magazines.
His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, was published in 2007 and
won a Betty Trask Award. Adam subsequently went on to win The Sunday Times Young
Writer of The Year Award in April 2008.
Judges: "This heart-stopping
story about the Mau Mau uprising brings hidden conflicts of conscience, race and
class to the surface in a brutally compelling narrative."
Sunday at the Skin Launderette by Kathryn Simmonds
(Seren)
Quietly persuasive and formally adept, the poems in
Kathryn Simmonds' first collection engage with both the quotidian and the
transcendental. Often set in urban or suburban contexts, her protagonists
struggle with mundane tasks such as cooking, commuting or office work, all the
obstacles of modernity, and then, by some shift of attention, or by some
narrowing of focus, they chance upon the surreal or the spiritual. This is
poetry of subtle contexts and allusions, as much concerned with the
vulnerability of the body as for the fate of the soul and the idea of ?keeping
faith' in God and life.
Kathryn Simmonds was born in Herefordshire in
1972. She has an MA in Writing from the University of East Anglia and
currently lives in London where she works as an editor. Her poems have
appeared widely in magazines and she was the winner of the 2006 Poetry London
Competition and the 2007 Wigtown Poetry Competition.
Judges:
"This first collection is witty, humane, confident, full of everyday details but
with a capacity to surprise and delight."
Salvation Jane by Greta Stoddart (Anvil Press)
At the
heart of many of the poems in Salvation Jane lies an apprehension of things
being lost or destroyed - whether a child or an illusion, faith or the very
earth we live on. The world changes, too, when someone enters it.
Greta Stoddart's poems of motherhood are intense double-edged celebrations; as
grief has its consolations, so joy is rarely entire.
Greta Stoddart was
born in 1966 and grew up in Oxford. She studied in Paris and Manchester.
Her first book, At Home in the Dark, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in
2002. She now lives in Devon and works as a poetry tutor.
Judges: "Honest, observant poems from a collection which is both
wonderfully unsettling and deeply life-affirming."
Shortlist for the 2008 Costa Children's Book Award (125
entries)
Judges
Victoria Hislop Writer
John
Newman Children's Buyer, Newham Bookshop
Sue
Polchow Northampton Schools Library Service
Advisor
Gwen Baines (aged 13), Kambole Campbell (aged 13), Sylvie Pope (aged
10) - Costa Book Awards competition winners
Ostrich Boys by Keith Gray (Definitions)
Kenny, Sim
and Blake are about to embark on a remarkable journey. Stealing the urn that
contains the ashes of their best friend Ross, they set out to travel 261 miles
from Cleethorpes on the English east coast to the tiny hamlet of Ross in
southern Scotland. After a depressing and dispiriting funeral they feel that
taking Ross to Ross will be a fitting memorial for a fifteen-year-old boy who
changed all their lives through his friendship. Little do they realise just how
much Ross can still affect life for them even though he's dead.
Keith
Gray was born in Grimsby and is the author of Warehouse, Happy, Malarkey and
Fearful. His first book Creepers, was shortlisted for the Guardian Award, and
his short novel that followed, The Runner, won the Smarties Silver Award.
Keith lectured for two years in Creative Writing at the University of
Lincolnshire and Humberside. He now lives in Edinburgh and spends much of
his time visiting schools passing on his love of books.
Judges: "A
life-affirming journey by three teenage boys told with sensitivity, compassion
and, above all, humour."
The Carbon Diaries by Saci Lloyd (Hodder Children's
Books)
It's January 1st, 2015, and the UK is the first nation to
introduce carbon dioxide rationing, in a drastic bid to combat climate change.
As her family spirals out of control, Laura Brown chronicles the first year of
rationing with scathing abandon. Will her mother become one with her inner wolf?
Will her sister give up her weekends in Ibiza? Does her father love the pig more
than her? Can her band - The Dirty Angels - make it big? And will Ravi Datta
ever notice her? In these dark days, Laura deals with the issues that
really matter: love, floods and pigs.
Saci Lloyd has worked as a script
editor for Camouflage Films, where she was involved in several projects
including a $20m Columbia Tri-Star co-production, Amy Foster. She is now head of
Media at Newham Sixth Form College. This is her debut
novel.
Judges: "Everyone who cares about the future of the planet
should read this book!"
Just Henry by Michelle Magorian (Egmont Press)
Set in
post-war Britain, Just Henry is the story of a young boy who escapes the
bleakness of life through his passion for cinema. His stepfather, whom he
despises, will never compare with his dead father, a war hero. Appalled to
find that his partners on a school photography trip include Jeffries, whose
father went AWOL and Pip, who is illegitimate, he's about to learn that
tolerance and friendship are more important than social stigmas. Processing a
film that he took on the trip, Henry makes an alarming discovery. Like a bomb
waiting to explode, his world is about to unravel.
Michelle Magorian was
born in Southsea, Portsmouth, of a Welsh mother and Irish father with an
Armenian surname, and began writing regularly while studying at the Rose Bruford
College of Speech and Drama in Kent. Having studied mime with the famous
Marcel Marceau, she went on to work in theatre, television and film, and toured
her one-woman mime show in Italy and England. Just Henry is her first new
book in ten years. Her first novel, Goodnight Mister Tom, won numerous awards
and has sold in excess of 1.2 million copies in the UK alone.
Judges:
"A gripping and masterful tale of the power of cinema, photography and
friendship in one boy's life."
Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine (HarperCollins Children's
Books)
When the good-looking boy with the American accent
presses the dropped negative into Rowan's hand, she's sure it's all a big
mistake. But next moment, he's gone, lost in the crowd of bustling
shoppers. These days, Rowan pretty much looks after her little sister
single-handedly - which doesn't leave much time for friends or fun. So
when she finds out that Bee from school saw the whole thing, it piques her
curiosity. Who was the boy? Why was he so insistent that the negative
belonged to Rowan? And what will the negative reveal?.?
Jenny Valentine
moved house every two years when she was growing up, then studied English
Literature at Goldsmith's College. She worked in a wholefood shop in Primrose
Hill for fifteen years - a source of inspiration for her first novel, Finding
Violet, which went on to win the Guardian Fiction Prize . She has also worked as
a teaching assistant and a jewellery-maker. Jenny is married to a
singer/songwriter and has two children. She lives in Hay-on-Wye, where she runs
another wholefood shop, hoping to find the inspiration for many more novels.
Judges: "A poignant story of a family coming to terms with a
terrible loss."
-ENDS-
For further press information, author pictures, author interview bids or book
jacket images, please contact:
Amanda Johnson
Costa Book Awards Press and Publicity
Telephone: 020
7751 2069 (direct line) or 07715 922180 (mobile)
Email: amanda@amandajohnsonpr.com
Notes for Editors:
About the Costa Book Awards:
The Costa Book
Awards, formerly the Whitbread Book Awards, were established in 1971 to
encourage, promote and celebrate the best contemporary British writing.
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
Children's Book - each receive £5,000.
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 Intercontinental
Hotel, central London on
27th January, 2009.
To be eligible for the 2008 awards, books must have been first published in
the UK or Ireland between 1
November 2007 and 31 October 2008.
The 2007 winner of the Costa Book of the Year was A L Kennedy for Day
(Cape).
About Costa:
Costa is now officially the
largest and fastest-growing coffee shop chain in the UK. It opened its
1000th milestone store in March 2008 in Moscow.
Costa was founded by Italian brothers Sergio and Bruno Costa in 1971. With
821 stores in the UK and over 300 internationally, Costa has enjoyed a
remarkable period of growth since it opened its first store. It now
operates in 25 countries.
Costa Coffee is the first UK coffee shop chain to commit to sourcing
Rainforest Alliance Certified Coffee.
Costa's in-store baristas are all coached in the art of coffee-making at the
company's unique Costa Coffee Academy based at its own roastery in Lambeth,
London.
Costa has won the British Sandwich Association's award for Best Coffee Bar
Retailer 2008.
Costa has been voted as one of the strongest UK brands by experts and
consumers and has been awarded ?Superbrand' status.
Costa set up a registered charity (no.327489) in 2006 called ?The Costa
Foundation' to give something back to the communities within the countries from
which Costa sources its coffee beans.
Costa is part of the Whitbread family of brands.
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