The shortlist for the 2013 Costa Book Awards has been announced, and in one pivotal category all the nominees are women. The Costa Book Awards — formerly known as the Whitbread Book awards — are given out every year to books written by British or Irish authors. Winners are chosen in five categories – novel, first novel, poetry, biography and children’s book – with winners announced in January. Amongst those selected winners, a book of the year is then chosen, which comes with a £30,000 (about $48,000) prize.
In this year’s best novel category, all of the shortlisted authors are women, and one writer, Bernardine Bishop, is being nominated posthumously. Bishop, who passed away in July at the age of 73, wrote the shortlisted Unexpected Lessons in Love, as well as two other yet-to-be-published novels, shortly before her death. “It is wonderful and also very sad because Bernadine’s not here to enjoy it,” her editor, Kate Parkin, told the Guardian. “I wish she had been.”
The shortlisted nominees in each category are:
Novel award:
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
Bernardine Bishop, Unexpected Lessons in Love
Maggie O’Farrell, Instructions for a Heatwave
Evie Wyld, All the Birds, Singing
First novel award
Sam Byers, Idiopathy
Kate Clanchy, Meeting the English
Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall
Sathnam Sanghera, Marriage Material
Biography award
Gavin Francis, Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins
Thomas Harding, Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War
Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink
Poetry award
Clive James, Dante, The Divine Comedy
Helen Mort, Division Street
Robin Robertson, Hill of Doors
Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter
Children’s book award
Ross Montgomery, Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door
Sarah Naughton, The Hanged Man Rises
Chris Riddell, Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse
Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire
[Guardian]