Badge Books Blog

Costa award category winners announced

AL Kennedy finally wins a major prize, while the other categories see a welcome showing by offbeat authors and small presses. But who will take the overall award?

AL Kennedy
Costa best novel winner AL Kennedy. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Barely have the hangovers subsided after the pre-Christmas literary award frenzy that is the Booker, Guardian First Book award, John Llewellyn Rhys and, er, the Bad Sex awards than the prize-giving machine trundles back into action. The Costas (the prizes formerly known as the Whitbreads) are first off the starting blocks just a day into this new year with an almost indecently hasty announcement of its "category winners".

As you might expect from its relatively low-key shortlists, the winners are an ever so slightly offbeat bunch. AL Kennedy bags her first major prize with her fifth novel, Day, beating Rose Tremain and Rupert Thomson to the £5,000 with her account of a second world war Lancaster tail-gunner, which was described by the judges as a "masterpiece".

I'm delighted that former postwoman and mystery shopper Catherine O'Flynn is finally getting her moment in the spotlight with her first novel, What Was Lost. The Booker judges, more fools them, let this darkly comic tale of a missing child and a shopping mall slip through the shortlist net while the Guardian First Book award had it pipped at the final post by Children of the Revolution.

As for the kid's winner, I was sorry that Meg Rosoff, of this parish, missed out with her atmospheric and twisty-in-the-tail tale of a coming-of-age in East Anglia in the early 1960s, What I Was. Instead, the prize has gone to a relative unknown, Ann Kelley, for her story of a 12-year-old girl with a serious heart condition, The Bower Bird. I must confess that the blurb doesn't exactly sell it to me - while "awaiting news of a heart transplant operation", Gussie "discovers her ancestors and an interest in photography, falls in love and has parent troubles - all whilst experiencing general adolescent angst". However, sickly children do have a long and illustrious history in kid's lit - think The Secret Garden's Colin or poor saintly Beth March - and if Costa judge and Skellig author David Almond thinks it's a worthy winner then I'm going to keep an open mind.

Still, the poetry winner has pleased my esteemed colleague Sarah Crown, who has declared that Jean Sprackland's Costa for her third collection, Tilt, is a "great win for a great collection". Sprackland beat the darling of the day, Forward first collection prize-winner Daljit Nagra, to the gong.

There's just the one man on the rostrum this year - Simon Sebag Montefiore with his biography of the Russian dictator, Young Stalin. But masculinity's loss is the indie press's gain - it's worth noting that two little fish have swum into the big pool for this prize - What Was Lost is from Birmingham's Tindal Street Press while The Bower Bird is published by the tiny Edinburgh-based Luath Press. A sign of a growing trend in 2008?

All the category winners now go forward to the final part of the competition - the chance to be crowned Costa book of the year. I'm rooting for Catherine O'Flynn. How about you?

Read more: Claire Armitstead's Costa blog.

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