Toibin, Ness, Selbourne pick up Costa awards
05.01.10 | Catherine Neilan
Colm Toibin has fought off competition from Man Booker-winner Hilary Mantel to pick up the Costa Novel Award for his sixth book Brooklyn (Viking). Raphael Selbourne, Patrick Ness, Graham Farmelo, and poet Christopher Reid were the other category winners as independent publishers picked up four of the five gongs.
Brooklyn has already competed against Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), having been longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker, but failed to make it to the next stage. However, it has won over the Costa judges, who described it as "poised, quiet and incrementally shattering".
Also at the awards, announced this evening (4th January), debut biographer Graham Farmelo won the Costa Biography gong for The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius (Faber), which the judges said was "the most compelling biography of the year".
Raphael Selbourne scooped the Costa First Novel Award for his "pitch perfect" Beauty (Tindal Street Press).
Costa's Poetry Award was given to Christopher Reid for A Scattering (Arete), a tribute to his wife following her death in 2005.
Patrick Ness won the Children’s Book Award for The Ask and the Answer (Walker), which the judges acclaimed as "a major achievement in the making".
All five writers, each of whom will receive £5,000, are now in the running for the 2009 Costa Book of the Year award. The winner, selected by a panel of judges chaired by novelist Josephine Hart and including Marie Helvin, Caroline Quentin, Gary Kemp, Dervla Kirwan and Tom Bradby, will be announced on 26th January. Last year, Sebastian Barry's Man Booker-shortlisted The Secret Scripture (Faber) won the overall award.
Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles bookshop gave enthusiastic reviews of all the category-winning titles, describing Beauty as "a smart and eloquent portrait", A Scattering as "an extraordinary tribute" and Ness as "simply a great writer".
He added: "Along with the Man Booker and Orange Prizes, the Costa Awards form the big three in terms of the awards which matter to the British readers. The fact that entertainment is as much of a criterion for judges as literary quality makes them very unpredictable, but always ensures winners which attract plenty of new readers."
Comments on this article
By Desmond Clarke
Christopher Reid's very moving tribute to his wife, A SCATTERING is the very first book to be published by Arete, the Oxford literary magazine edited by Craig Raine.05 Jan 10 16:31
