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2009 Shortlists | 2008 Category Winners and Shortlist | 2007 |2006 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005 | Winners all other ategories 1971 - present | back to top | home page

The Costa Book Awards is one of the most prestigious and popular literary prizes in the UK and recognisessome of the most enjoyable books of the year by writers based in the UK and Ireland. The Costa Book Awards started life in 1971 as the Whitbread Literary Awards. From 1985 they were known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2006, when Costa Coffee took over ownership - the year that both Costa and the Book Awards celebratedtheir 30 th anniversary. Awards are given across five categories. Each category wins £5,000 with the Book of the Year winning an additional £25,000.

2010 Costa Book Award Winners & Shortlists

Costa Book of the Year

Costa Book of the Year - Yahoo! We got it right. Of Mutability by poet Jo Shapcott has taken out the main £25,000 prize for her delightful collection.. Now at least her publisher will commission a decent graphic artist to give her work a non-shite coloured cover? Poetic Justice as Shapcott Wins Costa -

Costa First Novel Award

Costa Novel Award

Costa Biography Award

Costa Poetry Award

Costa Children's Book Award

Costa Book Awards 2009--Category Winners & Shortlists


2009 Book of the Year A poetry collection A Scattering by Christopher Reid,. has won was won this years prize .
Check out the winners and browse the shortlists in the different categories for the Costa Book Awards 2009. Find great novels, biographies, poetry and children's books to try.

See all the Costa 2009 Shortlists

2009 Shortlists

Costa First Novel Award

Winner: * Beauty by Raphael Selbourne

BeautyBeauty - in name and appearance - is a twenty-year-old Bangladeshi, back in England having disgraced her family by fleeing an abusive arrangedmarriage.  Placed on the jobseeker's treadmill and under continuing domestic pressure, in desperation she runs away.  Her fractious encounters with officialdom, fellow claimants and passers-by in the city streets, exacerbated by the restrictions (and comfort) of her language and culture, place her at the mercy of such unlikely helpers as Mark, a friendly Staffordshire Bull Terrier-breeding ex-offender, and Peter, a middle-class underachiever.  Determined and spirited, yet tormented by doubts, Beauty is forced to examine her own beliefs and think seriously about her future.  While her brothers search for her across the city, the conflict between her desire for personal freedom and her sense of family duty deepens.  What will she do?

Raphael Selbourne was born in Oxford in 1968.  He lived in Italy for many years, where he worked variously as a teacher and translator, sold television advertising and scooters, before moving to the West Midlands in 2004.

Judges: "Captures the raw humanity of inner city life with extraordinary authenticity."

Other shortlisted

Product Details |John the Revelator |The Girl with Glass Feet

* The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath
* John the Revelator by Peter Murphy
* The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

Costa Novel Award

Winner: * Brooklyn by Colm Toibin - Publisher: Viking

Product DetailsIn a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life - days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall - until she realises that she has found a sort of happiness. But when tragic news summons her back to Ireland, and the constrictions of her old life unexpectedtly give way to new possibilities, she finds herself facing a terrible choice between love and happiness in the land where she belongs and the promises she must keep on the far side of the ocean.

Colm Toibin was born in Ireland in 1955. He is author of five other novels, including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, both of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, and a collection of stories, Mothers and Sons.

Judges: "A wonderfully-observed story of love and loss."

Other shortlisted

Product Details| Product Details| Product Details|

Other Shortlisted

* Family Album by Penelope Lively
* Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
* The Elephant Keeper by Christopher Nicholson

Costa Biography Award

Winner: * The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo

Product DetailsThe greatest British physicist since Newton, Paul Dirac was a pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert Einstein. He predicted, purely from what he saw in his equations, the existence of antimatter. One of the youngest theoreticians to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and almost completely unable to communicate or empathise. Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers in Florida, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and the people around him.

Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. Formerly a theoretical physicist, he is now an international consultant in science communication. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. He lives in London.

Judges: "Moving, funny, sad and intensely readable, this is a fascinating insight into the psychology of genius."

Other shortlisted

| Product Details| Product Details| Product Details

*The Music Room by William Fiennes
* Coda by Simon Gray
* Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorehead

Costa Poetry Award

* A Scattering by Christopher Reid - Publisher: Arete Books

Product DetailsLucinda Gane, Christopher Reid's wife, died in October 2005. A Scattering is his tribute to her and consists of four poetic sequences, the first written during her final illness, and the other three at intervals after her death.

Christopher Reid received the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize for his first collection, Arcadia, a Chomondeley Award in 1995, and the 2000 Signal Poetry Award for his children's collection.  He has twice been nominated for the Whitbread Awards. His edition of Letters of Ted Hughes appeared in 2007.

Judges: "A life-affirming collection, full of urgency and feeling.

Other shortlisted

Product Details| Product Details| Product Details|

* Angels Over Elsinore by Clive James
* One Eye'd Leigh by Katharine Kilalea
* Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel

Costa Children's Award

Winner: * The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness - Publisher: Walker Books

Product DetailsFleeing before a relentless army, Todd has carried a desperately wounded Viola right into the hands of their worst enemy, Mayor Prentiss.  Immediately separated from Viola and imprisoned, Todd is forced to learn the ways of the Mayor's new order.  But what secrets are hiding just outside of the town? And where is Viola? Is she even alive? And who are the mysterious Answer? And then, one day, the bombs begin to explode...

Patrick Ness is the author of The Knife of Never Letting Go, Book One of the Chaos Walking trilogy which won the 2008 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the BookTrust Teenage Prize.  He has written two other books for adults and is a literary critic for the Guardian. He lives in London.

Other shortlisted

Product Details | Product Details| Product Details

* Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd
* Troubadour by Mary Hoffman
* Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera

SEBASTIAN BARRY WINS 2008 COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR

Jan, 2009 - Irish author Sebastian Barry has won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year award for The Secret Scripture, a moving account of one woman’s stolen life and her journey to reclaim the past.

Barry, the bookmaker’s odds-on favourite, won against one of the most acclaimed collections of finalists in the Book Awards history beating 91 year-old author Diana Athill for her memoir Somewhere Towards the End, bestselling first-time novelist Sadie Jones for The Outcast, poet and writer Adam Foulds for The Broken Word and popular children’s writer Michelle Magorian for Just Henry, to win the overall prize and a cheque for £25,000 at the glittering awards ceremony.

First Novel | Children's | Biography | Novel | Poetry

2008 Costa Book Award Winners and Shortlists

Costa First Novel Award

ISBN: 9780099513421 - The Outcast | ISBN: 9781844084869 - The Behaviour of Moths | ISBN: 9780701182748 - Inside the Whale

Winner: Sadie Jones for The Outcast - 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...

The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams - An extraordinarily haunting, subtle and moving first novel about secrets and lies and moths - the launch of a very brilliant new talent. Won in a major UK auction From her lookout on the first floor, Ginny watches and waits for her adored...

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith - In Soviet Russia, Leo Demidov is after a killer that the State denies exists. But he's in danger himself - from the country he's trying to protect In Stalin's Soviet Union, crime does not exist. But still millions live in fear. The mere suspicion...

Inside the Whale by Jennie Rooney - Stephanie Sandford, recently widowed, must tell her family the truth- but the past is indistinct and it's complicated. First, there was her mum, who developed an anxious streak after marrying the wrong Reg. Then there was the young man from the...

Costa Children's Award

ISBN: 9781405227575 - Just Henry | ISBN: 9780099456575 - Ostrich Boys | ISBN: 9780340970157 - The Carbon Diaries 2015 | ISBN: 9780007229659 - Broken Soup

Winner: Just Henry by Michelle Magorian - It's 1949 and life is bleak for Henry. He misses his father who died a war hero, and he escapes from his annoying stepfather and stepsister whenever he can by going to the movies. One day he meets Mr. Beaumont, a man who also loves films and...

Ostrich Boys by Keith Gray- Kenny, Sim and Blake are about to embark on a remarkable journey of friendship. Stealing the urn containing the ashes of their best friend Ross, they set out from Cleethorpes on the east coast to travel the 261 miles to the tiny hamlet of Ross in...

The Carbon Diaries by Saci Lloyd - A sharp and witty story from an outstanding new author: this is what global warming will really mean to the current teenage generation. It's January 1st, 2015, and the UK is the first nation to introduce carbon dioxide rationing, in a drastic bid...

Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine - An intriguing, compelling and moving new novel from the award-winning author of Finding Violet Park. An intriguing, compelling and moving new novel from the award-winning author of Finding Violet Park. When the good-looking boy with the American...

Costa Biography Award

ISBN: 9780297849087 - The Bloomsbury Ballerina | ISBN: 9780141028590 - The Boy with the Topknot | ISBN: 9780713996524 - Chagall

Winner: Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill - Diana Athill made her reputation as a writer with the candour of her memoirs and freed from any inhibitions that even she may once have had, she reflects frankly on the losses and occasionally the gains that old age brings, and on the wisdom and...

Bloomsbury Ballerina by Judith Mackrell - Bloomsbury Ballerina tells the story of the unpredictable Russian dancer who ruffled the feathers of the Bloomsbury set and became the wife of John Maynard Keynes.Born in 1891 in St. Petersburg, Lydia Lopokova lived a long and remarkable life.

If You Don't Know Me By Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton by Sathnam Sanghera - For Sathnam Sanghera, growing up in Wolverhampton in the eighties was a confusing business. There was his family, whose strange and often difficult behaviour he took for granted until, at the age of twenty-four, Sathnam made a discovery that...

Chagall by Jackie Wullschlager - A biography of Chagall. It features his paintings and the story of his life.

Costa Novel Award

Winner: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry - Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty 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...

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave - The stunning new novel from the author of INCENDIARY We don't want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it so we will just say this...

A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernieres - Chris is in his forties: bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. He's a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a prostitute into his car. Roza is Yugoslavian, recently moved to...

Trauma by Patrick McGrath - A darkly compelling story about how damaged people seek each other out As a psychiatrist Charlie Weir has seen every kind of trauma New York has to offer. Yet he has never managed to overcome the tragic mistake, seven years earlier...

Costa Poetry Award

ISBN: 9780224084444 - The Broken Word | ISBN: 9781852354398 - For All We Know | ISBN: 9781854114617 - Sunday at the Skin Launderette | ISBN: 9780856464119 - Salvation Jane

Winner: The Broken Word by Adam Foulds - Set in the 1950s, The Broken Word is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history. The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject...

For All We Know by Ciaran Carson - Reviews: .,."the reader will at once be drawn into what is at once a love story, a mystery with elements of film noir and spy thriller, and a mediation on reality and illusion, truth and lies... a remarkable work, richly detailed, subtle, intricate and moving." -- Alan Jenkins "Poetry Book Society (U.K.)"

Sunday at the Skin Launderette by Kathryn Simmonds - The World Won't Miss You for a While 9 The Boys in the Fish Shop 10 Talking to Yourself 11 The Dead are Dead 12 Leftovers 13 Reasons to be Cheerful 14 Seahorses 15 Before a Make-up Bag 16 The Men I Wish I'd Kissed 17 Moonlighting 18 ...

Salvation Jane by Greta Stoddart - Pupil 11 Instrument 12 A puzzle in four seasons 13 Salvation Jane 14 Faithful 15 Want 16 The wait 18 You drew breath 19 At play 20 The street lamp 22 Even here 23 In the kitchen 24 Really 25 Verfremdungseffekt 26 Plastic bag 28 The...

2008 Category Winners and Shortlist | 2007 |2006 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005 | Winners all other ategories 1971 - present | back to top | home page

Costa Book of the Year 1980 - present (Whitbread Book of the Year prior to 2006)

| ISBN: 9780099494058 - Day | ISBN: 9781847240675 - The Tenderness of Wolves | ISBN: 9780241133392 - Matisse the Master (v. 2) | ISBN: 9780755307500 - Small Island

2008 - Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture - Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty 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...

2007 - A. L. Kennedy, Day - Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and - most extraordinary of all - he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone...

2006 - Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves - It is 1867, Canada: as winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is murdered and a 17-year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man's cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond. In the wake of...

Prior to 2006, "Whitbread Book of the Year"

2005 - Hilary Spurling, Matisse The Master - Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a...

2004 - Andrea Levy, Small Island - In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving, multi-award winning novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a lightness of touch and a generosity of spirit that challenges and uplifts the reader.

2008 Category Winners and Shortlist | 2007 |2006 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005 | Winners all other ategories 1971 - present | back to top | home page

ISBN: 9780099450252 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time | ISBN: 9780140282344 - Samuel Pepys | ISBN: 9780439943659 - The Amber Spyglass | ISBN: 9780140285215 - English Passengers |

2003 - Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and...

2002 - Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self - Samuel Pepys achieved fame as a naval administrator, a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned, a figure of substance. But for nearly ten years he kept a private diary in which he recorded, with unparalleled openness and sensitivity to the turbulent world around him, exactly what it was like to be a young man in Restoration London.

2001- Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass - 'We're going to the land of the dead and we're going to come back' - Will and Lyra, whose fates are bound together by powers beyond their own worlds, have been violently separated. But they must find each other, for ahead of them lies the greatest...

2000- Matthew Kneale, English Passengers- Presents a vicar's ludicrous expedition in 1857 to the Garden of Eden in Tasmania. 'A big, ambitious novel with a rich historical sweep and a host of narrative voices. Its subject is a vicar's ludicrous expedition in 1857 to the Garden of Eden in...

1999 - Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Translation - Composed towards the end of the first millennium of our era, the Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf" is a Northern epic and a classic of European literature. In this new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work that is true, line by line...

2008 Category Winners and Shortlist | 2007 |2006 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005 | Winners all other ategories 1971 - present | back to top | home page

ISBN: 9780571194735 - Birthday Letters | ISBN: 9780571191031 - Tales from Ovid | ISBN: 9780571178223 - The Spirit Level | ISBN: 9780552996181 - Behind the Scenes at the Museum | ISBN: 9780349104577 - Theory of War| ISBN: 9780140240245 - Felicia's Journey

1998 - Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters - With just two exceptions, these 88 poems, in the form of an intimate and candid narrative, are addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom Ted Hughes was married. They were written over a period of more than 25 years, the first a few...

1997 - Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid - Hughes's three contributions to the anthology "After Ovid" an accurate account of the original so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. This volume continues the project...

1996 - Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level - A collection of poems from the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. The poems discover the possibility of a new beginning in many subjects and circumstances. Private memories, classical scenes and humble domestic objects are endowed with...

1995 - Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum- Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was...
1994 - William Trevor, Felicia's Journey - 'You're beautiful,' Johnny told her and so, full of hope, 17-year-old Felicia crosses the Irish Sea to England to find her lover and tell him she is pregnant. Desperately searching for Johnny in the bleak post-industrial Midlands, she is, instead...

1993 - Joan Brady, Theory of War - The story of a young boy sold into white slavery in post-Civil War America,who suffers at the hands of a cruel master. He escapes to a new life as a railroadman, then an itinerant preacher, but within him lies the need for revenge against his...

2008 Category Winners and Shortlist | 2007 |2006 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005 | Winners all other ategories 1971 - present | back to top | home page

ISBN: 9780749397470 - Swing Hammer Swing! | ISBN: 9781845951559 - A Life of Picasso (v. 1) | ISBN: 9780749391126 - Hopeful Monsters | ISBN: 9780007204571 - Coleridge | ISBN: 9780340508046 - The Comforts of Madness

1992 - Jeff Torrington, Swing Hammer Swing! - Tam Clay, 1960s Glasgow slum-dweller, father-in-waiting and wordsmith manque, stumbles through the drink-sodden world of the Gorbals underclass on a mini-odyssey of self-discovery.

1991 - John Richardson, A Life of Picasso- A biography that establishes the complexity of Picasso's Spanish roots, his aversion to his native Malaga and his passion for Barcelona and Catalan 'modernisme'. It introduces material on the artist's early training in religious art.

1990 - Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters- This Whitbread Book of The Year Award winner for 1990 is the final novel of the "Catastrophe Practice" series. Set in the 1920s and 30s it tells the story of two young radicals, Max and Eleanor, who meet, love, separate and come together again...

1989 - Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions - Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets. Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year...

1988 - Paul Sayer, The Comforts of Madness - Winner of the 1988 Whitbread Award, "The Comforts of Madness" is narrated by a catatonic who never speaks. To the rest of the world he is an inert body and is subjected to a variety of experiments, but his own consciousness is vital and reflective.

2008 Category Winners and Shortlist | 2007 |2006 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005 | Winners all other ategories 1971 - present | back to top | home page

ISBN: 9780753807095 - Under the Eye of the Clock | ISBN: 9780571225361 - An Artist of the Floating World | ISBN: 9780571134694 - Elegies || ISBN: 9780099769712 - On the Black Hill | ISBN: 9780140058871 - A Good Man in Africa | ISBN: 9780140057461 - How Far Can You Go?

1987 - Christopher Nolan, Under the Eye of the Clock - A powerful and moving autobiography from a gifted writer who has been compared to Joyce and Yeats This is the story of Joseph Meehan, born cruelly handicapped and known to the world as 'the crippled boy'. Filled with insight into the soul inside... 1986 - Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World - It is 1948. Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War II, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. The celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his house repairs...

1985 - Douglas Dunn, Elegies - Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1985, these poems were written after the death of Douglas Dunn's first wife in March 1981.

1984 - James Buchan, A Parish of Rich Women

1983 - John Fuller, Flying to Nowhere- Set on a Welsh island with a monastery, this is a story of human beings' desire for transcendency. A church agent investigates the disappearance of pilgrims visiting a sacred well, while the local abbot searches for the location of the soul.

1982 - Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill - A tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the 20th century. In depicting the lives and their...

1981 - William Boyd, A Good Man in Africa- Escapee from suburbia, overweight, oversexed ...Morgan Leafy isn't overburdened with worldly success. Actually, he is refreshingly free from it. But then, as a representative of Her Britannic Majesty in tropical Kinjanja, it was not very...

1980 - David Lodge, How Far Can You Go? -Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and their peers were bound to lose their spiritual innocence and their virginities on the way from the 1950s to the '70s. On the one hand there was the traditional Catholic Church, on the other the siren call of the...

2008 Category Winners and Shortlist | 2007 |2006 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005 | Winners all other ategories 1971 - present | back to top | home page

Winners 1971 to present all other categories (Costa since 2006 prior to that Whitbred)

2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1971 - 2005 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005back to top | home page

2008 Costa Book Awards

| ISBN: 9780099513421 - The Outcast | ISBN: 9780224084444 - The Broken Word | ISBN: 9781405227575 - Just Henry

First novel award - Winner: Sadie Jones for The Outcast - 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...


Novel Award — Winner: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry - Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty 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...


Children's Book Award Winner; Just Henry by Michelle Magorian - It's 1949 and life is bleak for Henry. He misses his father who died a war hero, and he escapes from his annoying stepfather and stepsister whenever he can by going to the movies. One day he meets Mr. Beaumont, a man who also loves films and...


Poetry Award — Winner: The Broken Word by Adam Foulds - Set in the 1950s, The Broken Word is an extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates a dark, terrifying period in British colonial history. The combination here of language and imagery that feel utterly contemporary, and subject...


Biography Award Winner: Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill - Diana Athill made her reputation as a writer with the candour of her memoirs and freed from any inhibitions that even she may once have had, she reflects frankly on the losses and occasionally the gains that old age brings, and on the wisdom and...

2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1971 - 2005 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005back to top | home page

2007 Costa Book Awards

ISBN: 9780955138416 - What Was Lost | ISBN: 9780099494058 - Day | ISBN: 9781906307325 - The Bower Bird | ISBN: 9780224080866 - Tilt | ISBN: 9780297850687 - The Young Stalin

First Novel Award – Catherine O'Flynn, What Was Lost - A lost little girl with her notebook and toy monkey appears on the CCTV screens of the Greek Oaks shopping centre, evoking memories of junior detective, Kate Meaney, missing for 20 years. Kurt, a security guard with a sleep disorder and Lisa...


Novel Award — A. L. Kennedy, Day - Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and - most extraordinary of all - he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone...


Children's Book Award — Ann Kelley, The Bower Bird - Gussie is not dead yet and she's got something to say. This moving piece of young adult fiction continues the story of a 12-year-old girl fighting for her life while facing the typical trials and tribulations of adolescence. Heartwarming and...


Poetry Award — Jean Sprackland, Tilt - Describes a world in free-fall. This work presents poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, and they also carry a sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of natterjack toads...


Biography Award — Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin - Stalin, like Hitler, remains the very personification of evil but also one of the creators of today's world. Simon Sebag Montefiore unveils theshadowy, adventurous journey of the Georgian cobbler's son who became the Red Tsar.Born in poverty...

2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1971 - 2005 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005back to top | home page

2006 Costa Book Awards

ISBN: 9781847240675 - The Tenderness of Wolves | ISBN: 9780747586203 - Restless | ISBN: 9780099451334 - Set in Stone | ISBN: 9781854114129 - Letter to Patience | ISBN: 9781843544982 - Keeping Mum

First Novel Award – Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves - It is 1867, Canada: as winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is murdered and a 17-year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man's cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond. In the wake of...
Novel Award — William Boyd, Restless - The major and stunning new novel about wartime espionage from bestselling author William Boyd It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian emigree living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret...


Children's Book Award — Linda Newbery, Set in Stone - When Samuel Godwin, an art tutor, accepts a job with the Farrow family at Fourwinds, little does he expect to come across such a web of secrets and lies. His two tutees - Marianne and Juliana - are as different as chalk and cheese. Samuel begins...


Poetry Award — John Haynes, Letter to Patience - Set in Patience' Parlour, a small mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria, at a time of political unrest, 'Letter to Patience' is an atmospheric book-length poem divided into cantos. The letter writer is in Britain, where he has returned with his...


Biography Award — Brian Thompson, Keeping Mum - Mum and Dad - Squibs and Bert - were a complete mystery to Brian Thompson as he grew up in Cambridge and London during the 1940s.Hismother danced with the Yanks all night and slept under a fake fur coat all day, and when his father bothered to...

2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1971 - 2005 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005back to top | home page

2005 Whitbread Awards

ISBN: 9780007232284 - The Harmony Silk Factory | ISBN: 9780099456278 - The New Policeman | ISBN: 9780141010397 - The Accidental | ISBN: 9780571202775 - Logue's Homer Cold Calls (Vol 1) | ISBN: 9780241133392 - Matisse the Master (v. 2)

First Novel Award - Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory - Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, this is the story of four people. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all...


Novel Award - Ali Smith, The Accidental - The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside downwhen a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples...


Children's Book Award - Kate Thompson, The New Policeman - Tells about JJ who sets out on a journey into a fairyland to buy time for his mother as a birthday present. This book features Irish music for JJ's whole existence is built round the ceili and each chapter relates to a tune, printed out as a...


Poetry Award - Christopher Logue, Cold Calls - Helen, the world's most beautiful woman, the wife of Lord Menelaos of Sparta, left Greece in the company of Paris, the son of Priam, King of Troy. To repossess her, a thousand Greek ships sailed to Troy. Nine years have passed. The Greeks have not...


Biography Award - Hilary Spurling, Matisse The Master - Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master shows usthe painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a...

2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1971 - 2005 | Book of the Year Winner 1980 to 2005back to top | home page

2004 Whitbread Awards

ISBN: 9780007190409 - Eve Green | ISBN: 9780755307500 - Small Island | ISBN: 9780192754325 - Not the End of the World | ISBN: 9780224073424 - Corpus | ISBN: 9781841157535 - My Heart is My Own

First Novel Award - Susan Fletcher, Eve Green - With the death of a mother and the abduction of a young girl, Susan Fletcher has written a novel about the innocence and terror of childhood. With the death of a mother and the abduction of a young girl, Susan Fletcher has written a vividly...


Novel Award - 2004 - Andrea Levy, Small Island - In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving, multi-awardwinning novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a lightness of touch and a generosity of spirit that challenges and uplifts the reader.


Children's Book Award - Geraldine McCaughrean, Not the End of the World -Everyone knows the story of the flood, the men God chose to survive and the animals that went in two by two. But what about the others that sailed on the Ark - the women and the children? This adventure story asks what it was really like when the...
Poetry Award - Michael Symmons Roberts, Corpus - Pelt 1 Ascension day 2 Food for risen bodies - I 3 Corpse 4 Corporeality 5 Attempts on your life 7 Post-mortem 8 Food for risen bodies - II 11 The box 12 Carnivorous - I 13 Food for risen bodies - III 14 The hands 15 Jairus 17 ...


Biography Award - John Guy, My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots - A dramaticreinterpretation of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots by a leading historian. A long-overdue and dramatic reinterpretation of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots by one of the leading historians at work today. She was crowned Queen of...

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2003 Whitbread Awards

ISBN: 9780571215164 - Vernon God Little | ISBN: 9780099450252 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time | ISBN: 9780340773833 - The Fire-eaters | ISBN: 9780571220632 - Landing Light | ISBN: 9780099283461 - Orwell

First Novel Award - DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little - Fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble, and it has something to do with the recent massacre of 16 students at his high school. Soon, the quirky backwater of Martirio, barbecue capital of Texas, is flooded with wannabe CNN hacks...
Novel Award - 2003 - Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and...
Children's Book Award - David Almond, The Fire-Eaters - David Almond's exceptional novel - winner of the Whitbread Award and the Smarties Book Prize. Also available as an unabridged audio recording, read by the author.


Poetry Award - Don Paterson, Landing Light - This collection of poetry from Don Paterson guides us down the labyrinths of our deepest and most private concerns. Paterson explores the swings of light and dark that mark our troubled feelings, including utterance and silence, disclosure and...

Biography Award - DJ Taylor, Orwell: The Life - George Orwell has become one of the most potent and symbolic figures in western political thought. Including interviews with friends and people who knew him in his years of obscurity, this book offers a human portrait of the writer too often...

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2002 Whitbread Awards

ISBN: 9780755300952 - The Song of Names | ISBN: 9780571212965 - Spies | ISBN: 9780340989043 - Saffy's Angel | ISBN: 9780330484534 - The Ice Age | ISBN: 9780140282344 - Samuel Pepys

First Novel Award - Norman Lebrecht, The Song of Names - Martin is growing up as an only child in wartime London until Dovidl, a refugee violinist from Warsaw, comes to stay. His arrival brings merriment and love, mischief and menace. Blood-brothers, they roam the ruined city, finding tragedy and...


Novel Award - Michael Frayn, Spies - There is very little evidence of the war where Keith and Stephen live. But the two friends suspect the inhabitants of the close aren't what they seem. As Keith informs his trusting friend, the district is riddled with secret passages and...


Children's Book Award - Hilary McKay, Saffy's Angel - After Saffron Casson discovers that she's adopted, life is never quite the same again. Her artistic parents and doting siblings adore her, but Saffy wants a piece of her past. So when her grandfather bequests a stone angel to her, Saffy knows she...


Poetry Award - Paul Farley, The Ice Age - From a Weekend First 3 11th February 1963 5 A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain & Europe 6 The Reading Hour 8 Big Safe Themes 9 Cod 10 The Ages 11 Dead Fish 12 The Landing Stage 13 An Erratic 16 Establishing Shot 17 The National in...


Biography Award - Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self - Samuel Pepys achieved fame as a naval administrator, a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned, a figure of substance. But for nearly ten years he kept a private diary in which he recorded, with unparalleled openness and sensitivity to...

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2001 Whitbread Awards

ISBN: 9780330480871 - Something Like a House | ISBN: 9780140286564 - Twelve Bar Blues | ISBN: 9780439943659 - The Amber Spyglass | ISBN: 9781852245078 - Bunny | ISBN: 9780753813348 - Selkirk's Island

First Novel Award - Sid Smith, Something Like A House - Presents an account of Jim Fraser's life as an army deserter living through the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution in China. Jim Fraser makes his home in a community so isolated that even the Cultural Revolution impinges little on the ways of...


Novel Award - Patrick Neate, Twelve Bar Blues - Lick Holden is a young jazz musician, in 1900 New Orleans. He issearching for his step-sister and comes across Sylvia, the English hooker and Jim her young companion; the mysterious seashell head-dress; Musa, the itinerant witchdoctor; and...


Children's Book Award - Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass - 'We're going to the land of the dead and we're going to come back' - Will and Lyra, whose fates are bound together by powers beyond their own worlds, have been violently separated. But they must find each other, for ahead of them lies the greatest...


Poetry Award - Selima Hill, Bunny- Little Dogs 7 Fun 8 Shoes 9 Hens 10 Tulips 11 Pyjama-case 12 Angel-Top 13 Ponyskin 14 Passion-Fruit 15 Pool 16 House 17 PRAWNS DE JO 18 Mussels 20 Cashmere 21 Lips 22 Egg 23 Plums 24 Vaseline 25 Sheets 26 Chicken 27 Jacket 28 ...


Biography Award - Diana Souhami, Selkirk's Island - The story of the real Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk was abuccaneer who sailed the South Seas on looting expeditions for gold and treasure. In 1703 he joined an expedition whose object was to plunder French and Spanish ships. Eventually they reached...

2000 Whitbread Awards

ISBN: 9780140276336 - White Teeth | ISBN: 9780140285215 - English Passengers | ISBN: 9781405212823 - Coram Boy | ISBN: 9780224059381 - The Asylum Dance | ISBN: 9780007132645 - Bad Blood: a Memoir

First Novel Award - Zadie Smith, White Teeth -Deals with a range of topics: friendship, love, war, three cultures, three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and, the tricky way the past has of coming back. One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years...


Novel Award - 2000- Matthew Kneale, English Passengers- Presents a vicar's ludicrous expedition in 1857 to the Garden of Eden in Tasmania. 'A big, ambitious novel with a rich historical sweep and a host of narrative voices. Its subject is a vicar's ludicrous expedition in 1857 to the Garden of Eden in...


Children's Book Award - Jamila Gavin, Coram Boy - Doomed babies entrusted to the care of a villain...children sold as slaves, an aristocrat's son disinherited when he refuses to give up a career in music - all these stories come together in this amazing story of adventure. Ages 10+.


Poetry Award - John Burnside, The Asylum Dance - Lucid, tender and strangely troubing, the poems in Burnside's seventh collection are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. Ports 1 Geese 9 Sense Data 12 Lady in the Snow, by Kuniyasu 14 Blues 15 Desserts...


Biography Award - Lorna Sage, Bad Blood - A Memoir - The author's memoir of childhood and adolescence brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in the small town of Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire. A Whitbread prize-winner, the book captures moments in...

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1999

1999 BOOK OF THE YEAR - BEOWULF, Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber

CHILDREN’S BOOK OF THE YEAR
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

J K Rowling
Bloomsbury

First Novel Award
White City Blue

Tim Lott
Viking

Back to top
Novel Award
Music and Silence

Rose Tremain
Chatto & Windus

Biography Award
Berlioz, Volume 2
David Cairns

Allen Lane The Penguin Press

Poetry Award
Beowulf

Seamus Heaney
Faber & Faber
NB: The structure of the Awards changed once more in 1999 when the winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year was selected by the final judging panel and then judged against the other four categories
for overall Whitbread Book of the Year.

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1998
BOOK OF THE YEAR

BIRTHDAY LETTERS
Ted Hughes
Faber & Faber

CHILDREN’S BOOK OF THE YEAR
SKELLIG
David Almond
Hodder Children’s Books

First Novel Award
The Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
Faber & Faber

Novel Award
Leading the Cheers
Justin Cartwright
Sceptre

Biography Award
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
Amanda Foreman
HarperCollins

Poetry Award
Birthday Letters
Ted Hughes
Faber & Faber

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1997
BOOK OF THE YEAR

TALES FROM OVID
Ted Hughes
Faber & Faber

CHILDREN’S BOOK OF THE YEAR
AQUILA
Andrew Norriss
Hamish Hamilton

First Novel Award
The Ventriloquist’s Tale
Pauline Melville
Bloomsbury

Novel Award
Quarantine
Jim Crace
Viking

Biography Award
Victor Hugo
Graham Robb
Picador

Poetry Award
Tales from Ovid
Ted Hughes
Faber & Faber

1996
BOOK OF THE YEAR

THE SPIRIT LEVEL
Seamus Heaney
Faber & Faber

CHILDREN’S BOOK OF THE YEAR
THE TULIP TOUCH
Anne Fine
Hamish Hamilton

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First Novel Award
The Debt to Pleasure
John Lanchester
Picador

Novel Award
Every Man for Himself
Beryl Bainbridge
Duckworth

Biography Award
Thomas Cranmer: A Life
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Yale University Press

Poetry Award
The Spirit Level
Seamus Heaney
Faber & Faber
NB: The structure of the Awards changed again in 1996 when the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year became an award in its own right (ie not judged against the other four categories) for the first time, with prize money of £10,000.

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1995
BOOK OF THE YEAR

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday/Black Swan

First Novel
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday/Black Swan

Novel
The Moor’s Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape

Biography
Gladstone
Roy Jenkins
Macmillan

Poetry
Gunpowder
Bernard O’Donoghue
Chatto & Windus

Beefeater Children’s Novel
The Wreck of the Zanzibar
Michael Morpurgo
Heinemann/Mammoth

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1994
BOOK OF THE YEAR

FELICIA’S JOURNEY
William Trevor
Viking

First Novel
The Longest Memory
Fred D'Aguiar
Chatto & Windus

Novel
Felicia's Journey
William Trevor
Viking

Biography
D H Lawrence: The Married Man
Brenda Maddox
Sinclair-Stevenson
Poetry

Out of Danger
James Fenton
Penguin Poetry

Children's Novel
Gold Dust
Geraldine McCaughrean
OUP

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1993
BOOK OF THE YEAR

THEORY OF WAR
Joan Brady
Andre Deutsch

First Novel
Saving Agnes
Rachel Cusk
Macmillan

Novel
Theory of War
Joan Brady
Andre Deutsch

Biography
Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life
Andrew Motion
Faber & Faber

Poetry
Mean Time
Carol Ann Duffy
Anvil Press

Children's Novel
Flour Babies
Anne Fine
Hamish Hamilton

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1992
BOOK OF THE YEAR
SWING HAMMER SWING!
Jeff Torrington
Secker & Warburg

First Novel
Swing Hammer Swing!
Jeff Torrington
Secker & Warburg

Novel
Poor Things
Alasdair Gray
Bloomsbury

Biography
Trollope
Victoria Glendinning
Hutchinson

Poetry
The Gaze of the Gorgon
Tony Harrison
Bloodaxe Books

Children's Novel
The Great Elephant Chase
Gillian Cross
OUP

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1991
BOOK OF THE YEAR
A LIFE OF PICASSO
John Richardson
Jonathan Cape

First Novel
Alma Cogan
Gordon Burn
Secker & Warburg

Novel
The Queen of the Tambourine
Jane Gardam
Sinclair-Stevenson

Biography
A Life of Picasso
John Richardson
Jonathan Cape

Poetry
Gorse Fires
Michael Longley
Secker & Warburg

Children's Novel
Harvey Angell
Diana Hendry
Julia MacRae

1990
BOOK OF THE YEAR
HOPEFUL MONSTERS
Nicholas Mosley
Secker & Warburg

First Novel
The Buddha of Suburbia
Hanif Kureishi
Faber & Faber

Novel
Hopeful Monsters
Nicholas Mosley
Secker & Warburg

Biography
A A Milne: His Life
Ann Thwaite
Faber & Faber

Poetry
Daddy, Daddy
Paul Durcan
The Blackstaff Press
Children’s Novel
AK
Peter Dickinson
Victor Gollancz

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1989
BOOK OF THE YEAR
COLERIDGE: EARLY VISIONS
Richard Holmes
Hodder & Stoughton
First Novel
Gerontius
James Hamilton-Paterson
Macmillan
Novel
The Chymical Wedding
Lindsay Clarke
Jonathan Cape
Biography
Coleridge: Early Visions
Richard Holmes
Hodder & Stoughton
Poetry
Shibboleth
Michael Donaghy
OUP
Children's Novel
Why Weeps the Brogan?
Hugh Scott
Walker Books

1988
BOOK OF THE YEAR
THE COMFORTS OF MADNESS
Paul Sayer
Constable

First Novel
The Comforts of Madness
Paul Sayer
Constable

Novel
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie
Viking

Biography
Tolstoy
A N Wilson
Hamish Hamilton

Poetry
The Automatic Oracle
Peter Porter
OUP

Children's Novel
Awaiting Developments
Judy Allen
Julia MacRae

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1987
BOOK OF THE YEAR
UNDER THE EYE OF THE CLOCK
Christopher Nolan
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
First Novel
The Other Garden
Francis Wyndham
Jonathan Cape

Novel
The Child in Time
Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape
Biography
Under the Eye of the Clock
Christopher Nolan
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Poetry
The Haw Lantern
Seamus Heaney
Faber & Faber
Children's Novel
A Little Lower than the Angels
Geraldine McCaughrean
OUP

1986
BOOK OF THE YEAR
AN ARTIST OF THE
Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber & Faber
FLOATING WORLD

First Novel
Continent
Jim Crace
Heinemann

Novel
An Artist of the Floating World
Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber & Faber

Biography
Gilbert White
Richard Mabey
Century Hutchinson

Poetry
Stet
Peter Reading
Secker & Warburg

Children's Novel
The Coal House
Andrew Taylor
Collins

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1985
BOOK OF THE YEAR

ELEGIES
Douglas Dunn
Faber & Faber

First Novel
Oranges are not the only Fruit
Jeanette Winterson
Pandora Press

Novel
Hawksmoor
Peter Ackroyd
Hamish Hamilton

Biography
Hugh Dalton
Ben Pimlott
Jonathan Cape

Poetry
Elegies
Douglas Dunn
Faber & Faber

Children’s Novel
The Nature of the Beast
Janni Howker
Julia MacRae
NB: The Whitbread Book of the Year was awarded for the first time in 1985 when the format of the Awards was changed. Prior to that, the Whitbread Literary Awards (as they were then called) were given as follows:

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1984
First Novel
A Parish of Rich Women
James Buchan
Hamish Hamilton

Novel
Kruger's Alp
Christopher Hope
Heinemann

Biography
T S Eliot
Peter Ackroyd
Hamish Hamilton

Short Story
Tomorrow is our Permanent Address
Diane Rowe

Children’s Novel
The Queen of the Pharisees' Children
Barbara Willard
Julia MacRae

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1983
First Novel
Flying to Nowhere
John Fuller
Salamander Press

Novel
Fools of Fortune
William Trevor
Bodley Head

Joint Biography
Vita
Victoria Glendinning
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
King George V
Kenneth Rose
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Children’s Novel
The Witches
Roald Dahl
Jonathan Cape

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1982
First Novel
On the Black Hill
Bruce Chatwin
Jonathan Cape

Novel
Young Shoulders
John Wain
Macmillan

Biography
Bismarck
Edward Crankshaw
Macmillan

Children's Novel
The Song of Pentecost
W J Corbett
Methuen

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1981
First Novel
A Good Man in Africa
William Boyd
Hamish Hamilton

Novel
Silver's City
Maurice Leitch
Secker & Warburg

Biography
Monty: The Making of a General
Nigel Hamilton
Hamish Hamilton

Children's Novel
The Hollow Land
Jane Gardam
Julia MacRae

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1980
Novel and Book of the Year
How Far Can You Go?
David Lodge
Secker & Warburg

Biography
On the Edge of Paradise:
A C Benson the Diarist
David Newsome
John Murrary

Children's Novel
John Diamond
Leon Garfield
Kestrel

1979
Novel
The Old Jest
Jennifer Johnston
Hamish Hamilton

Autobiography
About Time
Penelope Mortimer
Allen Lane

Children's Novel
Tulku
Peter Dickinson
Victor Gollancz

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1978
Novel
Picture Palace
Paul Theroux
Hamish Hamilton

Biography
Lloyd George: The People's Champion
John Grigg
Methuen

Children’s Book
The Battle of Bubble & Squeak
Philippa Pearce
Andre Deutsch

1977
Novel
Injury Time
Beryl Bainbridge
Duckworth

Biography
Mary Curzon
Nigel Nicolson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Children’s Book
No End to Yesterday
Shelagh Macdonald
Andre Deutsch

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1976
Novel
The Children of Dynmouth
William Trevor
Bodley Head

Biography
Elizabeth Gaskell
Winifred Gerin
OUP

Children's Book
A Stitch in Time
Penelope Lively
William Heinemann

1975
Novel
Docherty
William McIlvanney
Allen & Unwin

Autobiography
In Our Infancy
Helen Corke
Cambridge University Press

First Book
The Improbable Puritan:
A Life of Bulstrode Whitelock
Ruth Spalding
Faber & Faber
.
1974
Novel
The Sacred & Profane Love Machine
Iris Murdoch
Chatto & Windus

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Biography
Poor Dear Brendan
Andrew Boyle
Hutchinson

Joint Children's Books
How Tom Beat Captain Najork & His Hired Sportsmen
Russell Hoban & Quentin Blake
Jonathan Cape
The Emperor's Winding Sheet
Jill Paton Walsh
Macmillan

First Book
The Life & Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
Claire Tomalin
Weidenfeld & Nicolson

1973
Novel
The Chip Chip Gatherers
Shiva Naipaul
Andre Deutsch

Biography
CB: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
John Wilson
Constable

Children's Book
The Butterfly Ball & The Grasshopper's Feast
Alan Aldridge & William Plomer
Jonathan Cape
1972
Novel
The Bird of Night
Susan Hill
Hamish Hamilton
Biography
Trollope
James Pope-Hennessey
Jonathan Cape
Children's Book
The Diddakoi
Rumer Godden
Macmillan

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1971
Novel
The Destiny Waltz
Gerda Charles
Eyre & Spottiswoode
Biography
Henrik Ibsen
Michael Meyer
Hart-Davis
Poetry
Mercian Hymns
Geoffrey Hill
Andre Deutsch

2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1971 - 2005 | back to top | home page