by Charlotte Dibley
There’s one good thing about being plunged into the start of 2015: the winners of the 2014 Costa Book Awards have been announced!
With past winners including Roald Dahl, J. K. Rowling, Seamus Heaney, Claire Tomalin, Ian McEwan and Hilary Mantel, the prestigious Costa Book Awards seek to celebrate some of the most exceptional literary achievements of the year by authors who are based in the UK and Ireland.
Prizes are given in the following categories: Children’s Book, Poetry, Biography, Novel and First Novel. At the end of January, an awards ceremony sees one of the five category victors crowned as overall Book of the Year.
So, who came out on top in 2014? (We’ve even included the blurb for each one, aren’t we kind?)
There’s one good thing about being plunged into the start of 2015: the winners of the 2014 Costa Book Awards have been announced!
With past winners including Roald Dahl, J. K. Rowling, Seamus Heaney, Claire Tomalin, Ian McEwan and Hilary Mantel, the prestigious Costa Book Awards seek to celebrate some of the most exceptional literary achievements of the year by authors who are based in the UK and Ireland.
Prizes are given in the following categories: Children’s Book, Poetry, Biography, Novel and First Novel. At the end of January, an awards ceremony sees one of the five category victors crowned as overall Book of the Year.
So, who came out on top in 2014? (We’ve even included the blurb for each one, aren’t we kind?)
Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2014: How to be both by Ali Smith
‘How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.’
‘How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.’
Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2014: Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
‘Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn't remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable - or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger.
But there's one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it.
Because somewhere in Maud's damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about.
Everyone, except Maud . . .’
‘Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn't remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable - or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger.
But there's one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it.
Because somewhere in Maud's damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about.
Everyone, except Maud . . .’
Winner of the Costa Biography Award 2014: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
‘As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T. H. White’s tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White’s struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest.
When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so gain the ability to predict what it will do next. Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. As the days passed and I put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, my humanity was burning away.
Destined to be a classic of nature writing, H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for The Once and Future King. It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.’
‘As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T. H. White’s tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White’s struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest.
When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so gain the ability to predict what it will do next. Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. As the days passed and I put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, my humanity was burning away.
Destined to be a classic of nature writing, H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for The Once and Future King. It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.’
Winner of the Costa Poetry Award 2014: My Family and Other Superheroes by Jonathan Edwards
‘Leaping from the pages, jostling for position alongside the Valleys mams, dads, and bamps, and described with great warmth, the superheroes in question are a motley crew: Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun, and a recalcitrant hippo. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.’
‘Leaping from the pages, jostling for position alongside the Valleys mams, dads, and bamps, and described with great warmth, the superheroes in question are a motley crew: Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun, and a recalcitrant hippo. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.’
Winner of the Costa Children’s Book Award 2014: Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders
‘An epic, heart-wrenching follow-on from E. Nesbit's Five Children and It stories.
The five children have grown up and World War I has begun in earnest.
Cyril is off to fight, Anthea is at art college, Robert is a Cambridge scholar and Jane is at high school. The Lamb is the grown up age of 11, and he has a little sister, Edith, in tow.
The sand fairy has become a creature of stories ... until, for the first time in 10 years, he suddenly reappears.
The siblings are pleased to have something to take their minds off the war, but this time the Psammead is here for a reason, and his magic might have a more serious purpose.
Before this last adventure ends, all will be changed, and the two younger children will have seen the Great War from every possible viewpoint - factory-workers, soldiers, nurses and ambulance drivers, and the people left at home, and the war's impact will be felt right at the heart of their family.’
‘An epic, heart-wrenching follow-on from E. Nesbit's Five Children and It stories.
The five children have grown up and World War I has begun in earnest.
Cyril is off to fight, Anthea is at art college, Robert is a Cambridge scholar and Jane is at high school. The Lamb is the grown up age of 11, and he has a little sister, Edith, in tow.
The sand fairy has become a creature of stories ... until, for the first time in 10 years, he suddenly reappears.
The siblings are pleased to have something to take their minds off the war, but this time the Psammead is here for a reason, and his magic might have a more serious purpose.
Before this last adventure ends, all will be changed, and the two younger children will have seen the Great War from every possible viewpoint - factory-workers, soldiers, nurses and ambulance drivers, and the people left at home, and the war's impact will be felt right at the heart of their family.’
A varied mix to say the least! Have you read any of the winning books? If not, do any of the blurbs tickle your fancy?
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