Costa First Novel Award
Witness the Night by Kishwar Desai
In a small town in the heart of India, a young girl, barely alive, is found in a sprawling home where thirteen people lie dead. The girl has been beaten and abused. She is held in the local prison, awaiting interrogation for the murders that the local police believe she has committed.
But an unconventional visiting social worker, Simran Singh, is convinced of her innocence and attempts to break through the girl's mute trance to find out what happened that terrible night.
As she slowly uncovers the truth, Simran realises that she is caught in the middle of a terrifying reality where the unwanted female offspring of families are routinely disposed of.
Kishwar Desai lives in London with her husband, Lord (Meghnad) Desai. She has written a non-fiction book, Darleeingji, and has previously worked in journalism and TV.
Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla
It's Harrow in the 1990s, and Amit, Anand and Nishant are stuck. Their peers think they're a bunch of try-hard darkies, acting street and pretending to be cool, while their community thinks they're rich toffs, a long way from the 'real' Asians in Southall. So, to keep it real, they form legendary hip-hop band 'Coconut Unlimited'. Pity they can't rap...
From struggling to find records in the suburbs and rehearsing on rubbish equipment, to evading the clutches of disapproving parents and real life drug-dealing gangsters, Coconut Unlimited documents every teenage boy's dream and the motivations behind it: being in a band to look pretty cool - oh, and to get girls...
Nikesh Shukla is an author, filmmaker and poet. His writing has featured on BBC-2, BBC Radio 1 and 4 and the BBC Asian Network and he's currently working on a sit-com for Channel 4. His film, The Great Identity Swindle, co-directed with Videowallah, won best short film at the Satyajit Ray Foundation Awards in 2009. He is married and lives in London.
The Temple-Goers by Aatish Taseer
A young man returns home to Delhi after several years abroad and resumes his place among the city's cosmopolitan elite - a world of fashion designers, media moguls and the idle rich.
But everything around him has changed - new roads, new restaurants, new money, new crime - everything, that is, except for the people, who are the same, only maybe slightly worse. Then he meets Aakash, a charismatic and unpredictable young man on the make, who introduces him to the squalid underside of this sprawling city.
When Aakash is arrested for murder, the two of them are suddenly swept up in a politically sensitive investigation that exposes the true corruption at the heart of this new and ruthless society.
Aatish Taseer was born in Delhi in 1980. He has written for various publications including Time Magazine and the Sunday Times. He has also written a travel memoir, Stranger to History: a Son's Journey through Islamic Lands (2009), an investigation into his troubled family history and estranged father, and a highly acclaimed translation: Manto: Selected Stories. He lives in London and Delhi.
Not Quite White by Simon Thirsk
The young Jon Bull is sent be Westminster to Wales's last remaining Welsh-speaking town to see why all attempts to bring it into the twenty-first century have failed. Waiting for him is the beautiful but embittered Gwalia.....
Not Quite White explores the complex tensions generated when English colonialism meets Welsh nationalism. A passionate defence of cultural and political identity, and a considered plea for tolerance, it is also a sustained attack on the forces of small-town bigotry and corruption. Above all, it is an acknowledgement of the subtleties and ambiguities that exist in even the most entrenched attitudes.
Simon Thirsk is Chairman and a founder director of Bloodaxe Books. He has worked as a journalist, lecturer and charity co-ordinator and has an Honours Degree in Philosophy. His TV drama's Small Zones and No, I'm Not Afraid were both broadcast on BBC-2. Thirsk was born in Brentford, Middlesex, but now lives in Bala, North Wales and is a fluent Welsh speaker.
Costa Novel Award
Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty
When two police officers knock on Laura's door, her life changes forever. Her nine-year-old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed, and Laura is left both devastated and desperate for revenge against the man responsible for Betty's death.
Laura's grief re-opens old wounds and she is thrown back to the story of her passionate love affair with Betty's father David, their marriage and his subsequent affair with another woman. Haunted by her past, and driven to breaking point by her desire for retribution, Laura discovers the lengths she is willing to go to for love.
Louise Doughty is the author of five novels and one non-fiction book, A Novel in a Year, based on her hugely popular Daily Telegraph column. Doughty also writes radio plays and journalism and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio 4, as well as teaching for the Faber Academy. She lives in London.
The Blasphemer by Nigel Farndale
On its way to the Galapagos Islands, a light aircraft ditches into the sea. As the water floods through the cabin, zoologist Daniel Kennedy faces an impossible choice - should he save himself, or Nancy, the woman he loves?
In a parallel narrative, it is 1917 and Daniel's great-grandfather Andrew is preparing to go over the top at Passchendaele. He, too, will have his courage tested, and must live with the moral consequences of his actions. Back in London, the atheistic Daniel is wrestling with something his 'cold philosophy' cannot explain - something unearthly he thought he saw while swimming for help in the Pacific. But before he can make sense of it, the past must collapse into the present, and both he and Andrew must prove themselves capable of altruism, and deserving of forgiveness.
Nigel Farndale is the author of Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Other published work includes a collection of his award-winning interviews - with Hillary Clinton, Paul McCartney and Stephen Hawking, amongst others. He lives on the Hampshire-Sussex border with his wife and their three children.
The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell
Fresh out of university and in disgrace, Lexie Sinclair is waiting for life to begin. When the bohemian, sophisticated Innes Kent turns up by chance on her doorstep in rural Devon, she realises that she can wait no longer, and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, Lexie carves out a new life for herself with Innes at her side.
In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child. As Elina struggles to reconcile the demands of motherhood with her sense of herself as an artist, Ted is disturbed by memories of his own childhood - memories that don't tally with his parents' version of events.
As Ted begins to search for answers, so an extraordinary portrait of two women is revealed. Separated by fifty years, Lexie and Elina are connected in ways that neither of them could ever have expected?
Maggie O'Farrell is the author of four previous novels, After You'd Gone, My Lover's Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. She lives in Edinburgh with her partner and their two children.
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel 'Skippy' Juster is his roommate.
In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the Frisbee-playing Siren from the girls' school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest - including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath.
While his teachers battle over modernisation and Ruprecht attempts to open a portal into a parallel universe, Skippy, in the name of love, is heading for a showdown - in the form of a fatal doughnut-eating race that only one person will survive. This unlikely tragedy will explode Seabrook's century-old complacency and bring all kinds of secrets into the light.
Paul Murray was born in 1975 and lives in Dublin. His first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 and was nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010.
Costa Biography Award
How to Live A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
How To Live - the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years - is not a straight forward biography in the traditional sense.
Sarah Bakewell relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (when he was made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boetie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay.
Sarah Bakewell illuminates Montaigne's world, putting his writing in the context of his society, his culture, the political climate and his varying states of mind.
Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood in Europe, Australia and England. After studying at the University of Essex, she was a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before becoming a full-time writer, publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart and The English Dane.
She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University and the Open University, and catalogues rare book collections for the National Trust.
My Father's Fortune by Michael Frayn
Recalling memories of his own childhood and of his father, Michael Frayn's memoir is an emotional portrayal of childhood and family. 'An unknown place' is what Frayn's children called the shadowy landscape of the past from which their family had emerged. This book is an attempt at rediscovering the lost land of one's past before it slips away entirely.
Above all it is the story of Frayn's father, the quick-witted boy from a poor and struggling family, who overcame so many disadvantages and shouldered so many burdens to make a go of his life; who found happiness, had it snatched away from him in a single instant, and in the end, after many difficulties, perhaps found it again.
Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Headlong (1999) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while his most recent novel, Spies (2002), won the Whitbread Novel Award. His fifteen plays range from Noises Off to Copenhagen and most recently Afterlife. He is married to the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin.
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
264 wood and ivory carvings of animals, plants and people - none of them larger than a matchbox: apprentice potter, Edmund de Waal, was entranced by the collection when he first encountered it in the Tokyo apartment of his great Uncle Iggie. And later, when he inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger than he could have imagined....
Edmund de Waal travels the world in this memoir, to stand in the great buildings his forebears once inhabited. He traces the lines of a remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. And in doing so, he tells the story of a unique collection which passed from hand to hand and which, in a twist of fate, found its way home to Japan.
Edmund de Waal was apprenticed as a potter in Canterbury, studied in Japan and then read English at Cambridge. His porcelain is in 30 international museum collections: most recently he has created major installations for the V&A and Tate Britain and has had a major show with the Alan Cristea Gallery in London. He has written widely on art, ceramics, design and orientalism and is professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster.
Costa Poetry Award
Standard Midland by Roy Fisher
Roy Fisher is known internationally for his witty, anarchic poetry which plays the language, pleasures the imagination and teases the senses. But he is at heart an English Midlander.
In Standard Midland, he confronts and worries at nuances of perception and the politics of understanding. Many of the poems are concerned with landscapes, experienced, imagined or painted, particularly the scarred and beautiful North Midlands landscape in which he has lived for nearly thirty years.
Roy Fisher has published over 30 poetry books and has been the subject of numerous critical essays and studies. Born in 1930 in Handsworth, Birmingham, he retired as Senior Lecturer in American Studies from Keele University in 1982. He is a freelance writer and jazz musician, and lives in Derbyshire.
The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson
Robin Robertson's fourth collection is even more intense, moving, bleakly lyrical and, at times, shocking book than Swithering, winner of the Forward Prize. Alongside fine translations from Neruda and Montale and dynamic - at times, horrific - retellings of stories from Ovid, the poems in The Wrecking Light pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of the human.
Ghosts sift through these poems, certainties become volatile, the simplest situations thicken with strangeness and threat, all of them haunted by the pressure and presence of the primitive world against our own, and the kind of dream-like intensity of description that has become Robertson's trademark.
Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. His first collection won a number of prizes, including the 1997 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year Award.
He received the 2004 EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was selected by the Poetry Book Society as one of twenty Next Generation poets at work today.
Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott
In Of Mutability, Shapcott is found writing at her most memorable and bold. In a series of fresh, unflinching poems, she movingly explores mortality and the nature of change: in the body and the natural world, and in shifting relationships between people.
By turns grave and playful, arresting and witty, the poems in Of Mutability celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last and, in so doing, restore wonder to the smallest of encounters.
Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her first three award-winning collections are gathered together in, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke's French poems, was published in 2001.
New Light for the Old Dark by Sam Willetts
This is a book deeply conscious of history - one series of poems tracks his mother's escape, as a young girl, from the Nazis, in a narrative that moves from a Stuka attack on the Smolensk Road to the Krakow ghetto, the destruction of Warsaw, to Nuremberg and Nagasaki and, finally, his mother's grave.
Other poems address Englishness, secular Jewishness, and the childhood pleasures of Oxfordshire - an increasingly deceptive pastoral, stalked and eventually shattered by heroin, which brings a grim new existence among dealers and users.
The redemption the poet finds, through detox and rehab, love and writing, is full of regret for the years and lives wasted, but also offers a lyrical rebirth of the senses.
Sam Willetts was born in 1962 and has spent most of his life in Oxford, where he read English at Wadham College, and in London. He has worked as a teacher, journalist and travel writer - he has also experienced addiction and subsequent recovery.
Costa Children's Book Award
Flyaway by Lucy Christopher
While visiting her father in hospital, thirteen-year-old Isla meets Harry, the first boy to understand her love of the outdoors. But Harry is ill and, as his health fails, Isla is determined to help him in the only way she knows how.
Together they watch a young swan struggling to fly on the frozen lake outside Harry's window. Isla believes that if she can help the damaged swan, somehow she can help Harry. And in doing so, she embarks upon a breathtakingly magical journey of her own.
Lucy Christopher was born in Wales but grew up in Australia. After attempts at being an actor, a barista, a waitress and a nature guide, she moved back to the UK to earn a Distinction in a Creative Writing MA from Bath Spa University. She began writing Flyaway as part of her MA. Lucy has also worked for the RSPB, and was awarded a grant to study a PhD specifically studying the use of wilderness in children's books.
Her debut novel Stolen was written as part of this PhD and won the Branford Boase Award in 2010. In between writing and travelling, Lucy also works as a tutor at Bath Spa University.
Annexed by Sharon Dogar
Everyone knows the story of Anne Frank and her life in the secret annexe - or do they? Peter van Pels and his family are hidden away with the Franks, and Peter sees it all differently.
What is it like to be forced into hiding with Anne Frank? To hate her and then find yourself falling in love with her? To know you're being written about in her diary, day after day?
What's it like to sit and wait, to watch through a window whilst others die, and wish that you were fighting?
Anne's diary ends on August 4 1944, but in this imagined story, Peter's experience continues beyond the betrayal and into the Nazi death camps where he died.
Sharon Dogar lives in Oxford with her husband and three children. She loves writing, reading and day-dreaming. For the past ten years she's also worked with adolescents as a psycho-therapist. Annexed is her third novel.
Bartimaeus: The Ring of Solomon by Jonathan Stroud
Demon extraordinaire, Bartimaeus, is stuck as a spirit slave doing dead-end jobs in King Solomon's Jerusalem. The shame of it! Solomon's ring of legend, which affords its master absolute power, has a lot to answer for. But with the arrival of Asmira, an assassin girl with more than just murder on her mind, things start to get....interesting.
Throw in a hidden conspiracy, seventeen deadly magicians and some of the most sinister spirits ever to squeeze inside a pentacle, and Bartimaeus is in the tightest spot of his long career. He's going to have to use every ounce of magic in his ever-shifting body to wriggle his way out of this one.
Jonathan Stroud was born in Bedford in 1970. After studying English Literature at York University, he moved to London where he worked as an editor in a publishing firm. He is the author of many novels including the bestselling Bartimaeus sequence which have sold over 6 million copies worldwide, have been translated into 35 languages and for which the film rights have been sold to Miramax. Jonathan lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and two children.
Out of Shadows by Jason Wallace
Zimbabwe, 1980s. The fighting has stopped, independence has been won and Robert Mugabe has come to power offering hope, land and freedom to black Africans. It is the end of the Old Way and the start of a promising new era.
For Robert Jacklin, it's all new - new continent, new country, new school. And very quickly he is forced to understand a new way of thinking, because for some of his classmates the sound of guns is still loud, and their battles rage on.....white boys who want their old country back, not this new black African government. Boys like Ivan. Clever, cunning Ivan. For him, there is still one last battle to fight, and he's taking it right to the very top.
Jason Wallace was born in Cheltenham in 1969 but moved to London after his parents split up. Aged 12, his life was turned upside down when his mother remarried and the family emigrated to Zimbabwe. It is his experiences of growing up in a tough boarding school during the aftermath of the war for independence that forms the foundation of Out of Shadows. Jason is currently a web designer and lives in South West London.
