Costa Book Awards announces the category
Winning Authors in this year’s Awards.
[contentbox headline=”Winning Authors” type=”normal”]
Five authors are announced today as category winners for the 2012 Costa Book Awards. Novelist Hilary Mantel, debut novelist, Francesca Segal, biographers Mary Talbot and Bryan Talbot, poet Kathleen Jamie and children’s author Sally Gardner, have been announced as winners in their categories for the 2012 Costa Book Awards:
• Husband and wife team Mary and Bryan Talbot, who jointly win the Costa Biography Award for Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, an interweaving of two father-daughter relationships (that of James Joyce with his daughter Lucia, and that of the author with her father, a James Joyce scholar) and the first graphic work ever to win a Costa Award
• Hilary Mantel, who takes the Costa Novel Award for Bring up the Bodies, which won the 2012 Man Booker Prize
• Journalist, critic and writer Francesca Segal, whose debut novel The Innocents, set in a tightly-knit Jewish community in north-west London, is modelled on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, wins the Costa First Novel Award
• Poet Kathleen Jamie whose book The Overhaul, is described by the judges as ‘the collection that will convert you to poetry’
• Writer-illustrator and dyslexia campaigner, Sally Gardner, who as a child was once branded ‘unteachable’, and now takes the Costa Children’s Book Award for Maggot Moon.
Originally established in 1971 by Whitbread PLC, Costa announced its takeover of the sponsorship of the UK’s popular and prestigious book prize in 2006. 2012 marks the 41st year of the Book Awards.
The five Costa Book Award winners, each of whom will receive £5,000, were selected from 550 entries. The five books are now eligible for the ultimate prize – the 2012 Costa Book of the Year.
[/contentbox]
