29 Nov 2019
Costa Coffee today announces the shortlists for the 2019 Costa Book Awards. The 20 books nominated for this year's Awards were revealed this evening (Tuesday 26th November) on BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme.
The Costa Book Awards is the only major UK book prize open solely to authors resident in the UK and Ireland and also, uniquely, recognises some of the most enjoyable books published in the last year across five categories – First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book.
This year's Costa Book Awards attracted 701 entries, the most received in one year to date. Judges on this year's panels (three per category) included author Clare Mackintosh, novelist John Boyne and writers Kate Clanchy, Bali Rai and Mahsuda Snaith; historian, author and broadcaster, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb; and poet, critic and songwriter Jade Cuttle.
Winners in the five categories, who each receive £5,000, will be announced on Monday 6th January 2020. The overall winner of the 2019 Costa Book of the Year will receive £30,000 and be selected and announced at the Costa Book Awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 28th January 2020.
The winner of the Costa Short Story Award, voted for by the public, will also be announced at the ceremony. The shortlisted three stories for the Costa Short Story Award, now in its eighth year, will be revealed on the Costa Book Awards website, www.costabookawards.com, in December.
Since the introduction of the Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won twelve times by a novel, five times by a first novel, seven times by a biography, eight times by a collection of poetry and twice by a children's book. The 2018 Costa Book of the Year was The Cut Out Girl, a story of war and family, lost and found by Oxford Professor Bart van Es.
To be eligible for the 2019 Costa Book Awards, books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland between 1 November 2018 and 31 October 2019 and their authors resident in the UK for the previous three years.
Full details of the shortlists follow. For additional information, please visit www.costabookawards.com.
COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2019 SHORTLISTS
2019 Costa First Novel Award shortlist
Diary of a Somebody by Brian Bilston (Picador)
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams (Trapeze)
The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins (Viking)
The Other Half of Augusta Hope by Joanna Glen (The Borough Press)
2019 Costa Novel Award shortlist
Middle England by Jonathan Coe (Viking)
Confession with Blue Horses by Sophie Hardach (Head of Zeus)
Starling Days by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (Sceptre)
Shadowplay by Joseph O'Connor (Harvill Secker)
2019 Costa Biography Award shortlist
On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons by Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus)
The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz by Jack Fairweather (WH Allen)
In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin by Lindsey Hilsum (Chatto & Windus)
The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels by Adam Nicolson (William Collins)
2019 Costa Poetry Award shortlist
Surge by Jay Bernard (Chatto & Windus)
Flèche by Mary Jean Chan (Faber & Faber)
The Mizzy by Paul Farley (Picador)
Reckless Paper Birds by John McCullough (Penned in the Margins)
2019 Costa Children's Award shortlist
Asha & the Spirit Bird by Jasbinder Bilan (Chicken House)
Crossfire by Malorie Blackman (Penguin Books)
In the Shadow of Heroes by Nicholas Bowling (Chicken House)
Furious Thing by Jenny Downham (David Fickling Books)
Shortlist for the 2019 Costa First Novel Award
(114 entries)
Judges
Clare Mackintosh Author
Will Smith Bookseller, Sam Read Bookseller, Grasmere
Mahsuda Snaith Writer
Diary of a Somebody by Brian Bilston (Picador)
It's January 1st, and Brian Bilston is convinced that this year his New Year's resolution will change his life. Every day for a year, he will write a poem. It's quite simple. His life certainly needs some improvement: his ex-wife has taken up with a new man (a motivational speaker and marketing guru); Brian seems constantly to disappoint his son, Dylan; and at work, he is drowning in a sea of spreadsheets and management jargon. Poetry, then, will be his salvation. But there is an obstacle in the form of Toby Salt, his arch nemesis in the Poetry Group and a potential rival suitor to Liz, Brian's new poetic inspiration. To make matters worse, Toby announces that a boutique artisan publishing house is to bring out his first collection. When Toby goes missing just after the collection is published, Brian becomes the number one suspect. If he is regain his reputation and to have a chance of winning Liz, he must find out what has happened to Toby before it is too late.
Brian Bilston has been described as the Banksy of poetry and Twitter's unofficial Poet Laureate. With over 100,000 followers on social media, including J.K. Rowling, Ian Rankin and Grayson Perry, Brian has become truly beloved by the Twitter community. Winner of the Great British Write Off competition in 2015, he has served time as virtual Poet in Residence for Waterstones and the World Economic Forum. His first collection of poetry, You Took the Last Bus Home, was published in 2016 by Unbound.
Judges: “Gently pokes fun at the everyday, from bin collections to the cut and thrust of the poetry world. Warm, comic and original.”
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams (Trapeze)
Queenie Jenkins can't cut a break. Well, apart from the one from her long-term boyfriend, Tom. That's definitely just a break though. Definitely not a break-up. Then there's her boss who doesn't seem to see her and her Caribbean family who don't seem to listen (if it's not Jesus or water rates, they're not interested). She's trying to fit in two worlds that don't really understand her. It's no wonder she's struggling. She was named to be queen of everything. So why is she finding it so hard to rule her own life?
Journalist, screenwriter and author Candice Carty-Williams was born in 1989, the result of an affair between a Jamaican cab driver and a dyslexic Jamaican-Indian receptionist. In 2016, Candice created and launched the Guardian and 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, the first inclusive initiative of its kind in book publishing. Queenie, a Sunday Times bestseller, has been shortlisted for the Waterstones, Foyles and Goodreads Book of 2019, as well as selected as the Blackwell's Debut of the Year and optioned for the small screen. As a journalist she's written for the Guardian, i-D, Vogue International, the Sunday Times, BEAT Magazine, Black Ballad and more. She will probably always live in South London.
Judges: “Eminently readable, funny and surprisingly thought-provoking.”
The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins (Viking)
1826, and all of London is in a frenzy. Crowds gather at the gates of the Old Bailey to watch as Frannie Langton, maid to Mr and Mrs Benham, goes on trial for their murder. The testimonies against her are damning - slave, whore, seductress. And they may be the truth. But they are not the whole truth. For the first time Frannie must tell her story. It begins with a girl learning to read on a plantation in Jamaica, and it ends in a grand house in London, where a beautiful woman waits to be freed. But through her fevered confessions, one burning question haunts Frannie Langton: could she have murdered the only person she ever loved?
Sara Collins studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years. In 2014 she embarked upon the Creative Writing Masters at Cambridge University, where she won the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize of Re-creative Writing and was shortlisted for the 2016 Lucy Cavendish Prize for a book inspired by her love of gothic fiction. This turned into her first novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Judges: “Rich and compelling – an historical page-turner with stunning prose.”
The Other Half of Augusta Hope by Joanna Glen (The Borough Press)
Augusta Hope has never felt like she fits in. And she's right – she doesn't. At six, she's memorising the dictionary. At seven, she's correcting her teachers. At eight, she spins the globe and picks her favourite country on the sound of its name: Burundi. And now that she's an adult, Augusta has no interest in the goings-on of the small town where she lives with her parents and her beloved twin sister, Julia. When an unspeakable tragedy upends everything in Augusta's life, she's propelled headfirst into the unknown. She's determined to find where she belongs – but what if her true home, and heart, are half a world away?
Joanna Glen read Spanish at the University of London, with a stint at the Faculty of Arts at Córdoba University in the south of Spain. She went on to teach Spanish and English to all ages and, latterly, was a School Principal in London. She has edited a variety of non-fiction books, is a visiting lecturer, a communications coach and an adviser and trainer for schools. Joanna's short fiction has appeared in the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology. She lives with her husband and children on the River Thames in Battersea, returning to Andalusia whenever it gets too grey.
Judges: “Two stories intertwine in this beautifully written, offbeat and heartbreaking debut.”
Shortlist for the 2019 Costa Novel Award
(190 entries)
Judges
John Boyne Novelist
Francesca Brown Contributing Books Editor, Stylist
Sarah Turner Trading Controller (e-commerce), WHSmith
Middle England by Jonathan Coe (Viking)
Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give way to Olympic fever, Middle England follows a vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change. There are newlyweds Ian and Sophie, who disagree about the future of the country and, possibly, the future of their relationship; Doug, the political commentator who writes impassioned columns about austerity from his Chelsea townhouse, and his radical teenage daughter who will stop at nothing in her quest for social justice; Benjamin Trotter, who embarks on an apparently doomed new career in middle age, and his father Colin, whose last wish is to vote in the EU referendum. And within all these lives is the story of modern England - a story of nostalgia and delusion, of bewilderment and of barely-suppressed rage.
Jonathan Coe is the author of twelve novels which include the highly-acclaimed bestsellers What a Carve Up!, and The Rotters' Club. He is also the author of Like a Fiery Elephant (a biography of B S Johnson) and The Broken Mirror, a children's book.
Judges: “A funny and perceptive account of ordinary lives during an extraordinary time.”
Confession with Blue Horses by Sophie Hardach (Head of Zeus)
Tobi and Ella's childhood in East Berlin is shrouded in mystery. Now adults living in London, their past is full of unanswered questions. Both remember their family's daring and terrifying attempt to escape. But what happened next? Where did their parents disappear to, and why? What happened to Heiko, their little brother? And was there ever a painting of three blue horses? In contemporary Germany, Aaron works for a Stasi archive, making his way through old files, reconstructing the tragic history of thousands of families. But one file in particular catches his eye; and soon unravelling the secrets at its heart becomes an obsession. When Ella is left a stash of her mother's notebooks, she and Tobi embark on a search that will take them back to Berlin. Her fate clashes with Aaron's, and they piece together the details of Ella's past... and a family destroyed.
Sophie Hardach is the author of two novels: The Registrar's Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, about Kurdish refugees, and Of Love and Other Wars, about pacifists during World War Two. Also a journalist, she worked as a correspondent for Reuters news agency in Tokyo, Paris and Milan and has written for a number of publications including the Atlantic, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph.
Judges: “A moving portrait of a family living through a devastating period of history – accessible, unique and eye-opening.”
Starling Days by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (Sceptre)
Mina is staring over the edge of the George Washington Bridge when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the officers she's not about to jump, but they don't believe her. Her husband Oscar is called to pick her up. Oscar hopes that leaving New York for a few months will give Mina the space to heal. They travel to London, to an apartment wall-papered with indigo-eyed birds, to Oscar's oldest friends, to a canal and blooming flower market. Mina, a classicist, searches for solutions to her failing mental health using mythological women. But she finds a beam of light in a living woman. Friendship and attraction blossom until Oscar and Mina's complicated love is tested.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's first novel, Harmless Like You, won the Author's Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize. In the USA, it was a New York Times Editors' Choice and an NPR 2017 Great Read. Her work has appeared in several publications including Granta, the Guardian and the Paris Review. She lives in London.
Judges: “A beautiful and original take on mental health, told with humour and hope.”
Shadowplay by Joseph O'Connor (Harvill Secker)
1878: The Lyceum Theatre, London. Three extraordinary people begin their life together, a life that will be full of drama, transformation, passionate and painful devotion to art and to one another. Henry Irving, the Chief, is the volcanic leading man and impresario; Ellen Terry is the most lauded and desired actress of her generation, outspoken and generous of heart; and ever following along behind them in the shadows is the unremarkable theatre manager, Bram Stoker. Fresh from life in Dublin as a clerk, Bram may seem the least colourful of the trio but he's wrestling with dark demons in a new city, in a new marriage, and with his own literary aspirations. As he walks the London streets at night, streets haunted by the Ripper and the gossip which swirls around his friend Oscar Wilde, he finds new inspiration. But the Chief is determined that nothing will get in the way of his manager's devotion to the Lyceum and to himself. And both men are enchanted by the beauty and boldness of the elusive Ellen.
Joseph O'Connor was born in Dublin. His previous books include eight novels including Cowboys and Indians (Whitbread Prize shortlist) and Star of the Sea (American Library Association Award, Irish Post Award for Fiction, France's Prix Millepages, Italy's Premio Acerbi, Prix Madeleine Zepter for European novel of the year). His fiction has been translated into forty languages. He received the 2012 Irish PEN Award for outstanding achievement in literature and in 2014 was appointed Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.
Judges: “An atmospheric novel, offering a thrilling insight into the creative minds of writers and actors.”
Shortlist for the 2019 Costa Biography Award
(172 entries)
Judges
Professor Suzannah Lipscomb Historian, Author and Broadcaster
James Marriott Deputy Books Editor, The Times
Will Rycroft Audience Development Manager, Waterstones
On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons by Laura Cumming (Chatto & Windus)
In the autumn of 1929, a small child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach. Five agonising days went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child remembered nothing of these events and nobody ever spoke of them at home. It was another fifty years before she even learned of the kidnap. The girl became an artist and had a daughter, art writer Laura Cumming. Cumming grew up enthralled by her mother's strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet of the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. So many puzzles remained to be solved. Cumming began with a few criss-crossing lives in this fraction of English coast – the postman, the grocer, the elusive baker – but soon her search spread right out across the globe as she discovered just how many lives were affected by what happened that day on the beach – including her own.
Laura Cumming has been chief art critic of the Observer since 1999. Her book, The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez, was Book of the Week on Radio 4, Wall Street Journal Book of the Year and a New York Times bestseller. It won the 2017 James Tait Black Biography Prize and was published to critical acclaim ('A riveting detective story: readers will be spellbound' Colm Tóibín). Her first book, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, was described by Nick Hornby as 'Brilliant, fizzing with ideas not just about art but human nature' and by Julian Barnes as 'that rare item: an art book where the text is so enthralling that the pictures almost seem like an interruption'.
Judges: “How rare to find a book which is not just edge-of-your-seat gripping but hauntingly and beautifully written too."
The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz by Jack Fairweather (WH Allen)
In the summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interred at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich. His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre was Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, Witold not only endured Auschwitz but managed to create an underground resistance army there that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities out of Auschwitz via secret messages and radio broadcasts. His reports from the camp were to shape the Alliedresponse to the Holocaust - yet his story was all but forgotten for decades.
Jack Fairweather is a former war reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan and the author of A War of Choice and The Good War. After graduating from Oxford University, Jack joined the Daily Telegraph in 2002 as the paper's Kuwait correspondent and took part in the invasion of Iraq with British troops as an embedded reporter. As the violence escalated in Iraq, Jack was fortunate to survive a suicide bomb attack, a kidnapping attempt and almost daily mortar attacks on his house. By the end he was living in a heavily-fortified hotel as a virtual prisoner but determined to carry on reporting. Jack now splits his time between the UK and Vermont.
Judges: “An honest, powerful, hugely-accomplished and completely compelling story of horror and heroism.”
In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin by Lindsey Hilsum (Chatto & Windus)
Marie Colvin was glamorous, hard-drinking, braver than the boys, with a troubled and rackety personal life. She reported from the most dangerous places in the world, going in further and staying longer than anyone else. Like her hero, the legendary reporter Martha Gellhorn, she sought to bear witness to the horrifying truths of war, to write 'the first draft of history' and to shine a light on the suffering of ordinary people. Marie covered the major conflicts of our time: Israel and Palestine, Chechnya, East Timor, Sri Lanka (where she was hit by a grenade and lost sight in her left eye, resulting in her trademark eye-patch), Iraq and Afghanistan. Her anecdotes about encounters with dictators and presidents – including Colonel Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat, whom she knew well – were incomparable. She was much admired, and as famous for her wild parties as for the extraordinary lengths to which she went to tell the story, including being smuggled into Syria where she was killed in 2012. Written by fellow foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum, this is the story of the most daring war reporter of her time.
Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News International Editor and the author of Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution. Like Marie, she has covered many conflicts of recent years. In 1994 she was the only English-speaking journalist in Rwanda when the genocide began and in 1999 reported from Belgrade on the NATO bombing of Serbia. During the 2003 US invasion, she was in Baghdad and she covered the Fallujah assault in 2004. From 2006-8 she was the Channel 4 News China Correspondent. She has won several awards including Royal Television Society Journalist of the year and the Charles Wheeler Award.
Judges: “A riveting insight into an extraordinary life and career; a fitting tribute to a brave and singular woman.”
The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels by Adam Nicolson (William Collins)
It is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, Coleridge's unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, Wordsworth's revolutionary verses in Lyrical Ballads, and the greatness of Tintern Abbey, his paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. Adam Nicolson tells the story, almost day by day, poem by poem, of the year in the late 1790s that Coleridge, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and an ever-shifting cast of friends, dependants and acolytes spent together in the Quantock Hills in Somerset.
Adam Nicolson is the author of several books on great literature, on the King James Bible and on place including Sea Room. He's the winner of the Wainwright, Ondaatje, William Heinemann and Somerset Maugham prizes, and now lives in Sussex and Crete. The artist Tom Hammick accompanied Adam for much of the year, making woodcuts from the fallen timber in the park at Alfoxden where the Wordsworths lived, and his images depict their lives at the source of our modern sensibility. Tom is Senior Lecturer of Paintings at the University of Brighton.
Judges: “This story of brilliant young poets striving for greatness is told in exquisite, poetic prose and crackles with passion, life and enthusiasm.”
Shortlist for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award
(81 entries)
Judges
Kate Clanchy Writer
Jade Cuttle Poet, Songwriter and Critic
Rohan Silva Co-founder and CEO, Second Home
Surge by Jay Bernard (Chatto & Windus)
Jay Bernard's debut is a fearless and original exploration of the black British archive: an enquiry into the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in south London in which thirteen young black people were killed. Dubbed the 'New Cross Massacre', the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain. Tracing a line from New Cross to the 'towers of blood' of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice.
Jay Bernard is the author of several pamphlets including The Red and Yellow Nothing (Ink Sweat & Tears Press, 2016) which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2017. A film programmer at BFI Flare and an archivist at Statewatch, they also participated in 'The Complete Works II' project in 2014 in which they were mentored by Kei Miller. Jay was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005 and a winner of SLAMbassadors UK Spoken Word Championship. In 2019 Jay was selected by Jackie Kay as one of Britain's ten best BAME writers for the British Council and National Centre for Writing's International Literature Showcase. Their poems have featured in several collections including Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets.
Judges: “In its range of voices, its artful and beautiful use of language and languages, this account of two devastating fires seemed to us all an important book – and a very moving one.”
Flèche by Mary Jean Chan (Faber & Faber)
Flèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan's young adult years, when she competed locally and internationally for her home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche') and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one's need for safety alongside the desire to shed one's protective armour in order to fully embrace the world.
Mary Jean Chan is a London-based poet, lecturer and critic from Hong Kong. She is an editor of Oxford Poetry and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University. She came second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition and has twice been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2019 and won the 2018 Poetry Society Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for her collection's title poem Flèche'. She was recently announced as a guest co-editor for the Spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review and was chosen by Jackie Kay as one of her 10 Best BAME writers in Britain for the British Council's International Literature Showcase. Flèche is her first book.
Judges: “This sensuous and insightful book moves between worlds and languages with such grace and wit, and an unfailing tender gaze.”
The Mizzy by Paul Farley (Picador)
In The Mizzy, Paul Farley locates the cultural tipping point at which the world went from black-and-white to colour, analogue to digital – and where the recent past effectively became ancient history, archaeology and fossil. The poet charts the experience of growing up in the ruins of that earlier society, one which gave birth to modernity but could not host it; he also speaks as witness to its accelerated rate of change, amid the phantoms of pop culture and advertising, and where 'the natural world' helplessly intersected with the man-made.
Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He's published four collections of poetry with Picador, most recently The Dark Film (2012). His other books include Edgelands (with Michael Symmons Roberts, 2011), and he's also edited a selection of John Clare's poetry. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a frequent broadcaster, he has received numerous awards including Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Judges: “We all relished this witty and wonderful collection. It was a real pleasure to read.”
Reckless Paper Birds by John McCullough (Penned in the Margins)
These exuberant poems welcome you into a psychedelic, parallel world of 'vomit and blossom'. With a magpie's eye for hidden charms, McCullough ranges across birdlife, Grindr and My Little Pony while also addressing social issues from homelessness to homophobia.
John McCullough teaches creative writing at the University of Brighton, the Arvon Foundation and New Writing South, and lives in Hove, East Sussex. His first collection of poems, The Frost Fairs, won the Polari First Book Prize in 2012. It was a Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry School and a summer read for The Observer. His second collection Spacecraft, published in 2016, was named one of The Guardian's Best Books for Summer and shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize.
Judges: “This collection – hilarious, harrowing and hyper-modern – offers a startlingly fresh insight into vulnerability and suffering.”
Shortlist for the 2019 Costa Children's Book Award
(144 entries)
Judges
Charlotte Eyre Children's Editor, The Bookseller
Bali Rai Writer
Danny van Emden Children's Buyer and Deputy Manager, West End Lane Books
Asha & the Spirit Bird by Jasbinder Bilan (Chicken House)
Asha lives in the foothills of the Himalayas. Money is tight and she misses her papa who works in the city. When he suddenly stops sending his wages, a ruthless moneylender ransacks their home and her mother talks of leaving. From her den in the mango tree, Asha makes a pact with her best friend, Jeevan, to find her father and make things right. Guided by a majestic bird which Asha believes to be the spirit of her grandmother, she and Jeevan embark on a journey to the city, across the Himalayas, to find her father and save her home …
According to family stories, Jasbinder Bilan was born in a stable in the foothills of the Himalayas. Until she was a year and a half, she lived on a farm in India inhabited by a grumpy camel and a monkey called Oma. Asha & the Spirit Bird was inspired by her strong and special relationship with her grandmother, with whom she was very close. During an MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University, Jasbinder realised she wanted to write a story set in India and used the diaries from her own visits as inspiration. She lives in Somerset with her husband, two teenage boys and dog Enzo, and splits her time between teaching and writing.
Judges: “Imaginative, magical, heartrending and hopeful.”
Crossfire by Malorie Blackman (Penguin Books)
Thirty-four years have passed since Sephy Hadley (a Cross) first met Callum McGregor (a Nought). Their love was forbidden, powerful - and deadly. Life is seemingly very different now for Noughts and Crosses - including for Sephy and Callum's families. But old wounds from the past are hard to heal, and when you're playing a game as dangerous as they are, it won't be long before someone gets caught in the crossfire.
Malorie Blackman has written over sixty books for children and young adults. Many of her books have also been adapted for stage and television, including a BAFTA-Award-winning BBC production of Pig-Heart Boy and a Pilot Theatre stage adaptation of Noughts & Crosses. There is also a major BBC production of Noughts & Crosses, with Roc Nation (JayZ's entertainment company) curating and releasing the soundtrack as Executive Music Producer. In 2008 Malorie received an OBE for her services to children's literature, and between 2013 and 2015 she was the Children's Laureate. Most recently, Malorie wrote for the Doctor Who series on BBC One. Crossfire is the fifth novel in her Noughts & Crosses series.
Judges: “A punchy, pacy, relevant and thought-provoking book for young and old alike.”
In the Shadow of Heroes by Nicholas Bowling (Chicken House)
Fourteen-year-old Cadmus has been scholar Tullus's slave since he was a baby – his master is the only family he knows. But when Tullus disappears and a taciturn slave called Tog, formerly a British princess, arrives with a secret message, Cadmus's life is turned upside down. The pair follow a trail that leads to Emperor Nero himself, and his crazed determination to possess the Golden Fleece of Greek mythology. This epic quest will push Cadmus to the edge of the Roman Empire – and reveal unexpected truths about his past ...
Nick Bowling is an author, stand-up comic, musician and Latin teacher from London. He graduated from Oxford University in 2007 with a BA in Classics and English, and again in 2010 with a Masters in Greek and Latin Language and Literature, before moving to his first teaching job. While writing his debut novel Witchborn, he also performed a solo show at the Edinburgh Festival, and has co-written, recorded and released an album and two EPs with soul-folk singer Mary Erskine, Me For Queen.
Judges: “A richly-observed and intriguing rip-roaring ancient world adventure.”
Furious Thing by Jenny Downham (David Fickling Books)
Furious Thing roars with justifiable anger at an unfair world, as one girl fights to claim back the spaces that belong to her and battles to be heard… Lexi's angry. And it's getting worse. If only she could stop losing her temper and behave herself, her stepfather would accept her, her mum would love her like she used to and her step-brother would declare his crushing desire to spend the rest of his life with her. She wants these things so badly that she determines to swallow her anger and make her family proud. But pushing fury down doesn't make it disappear. Instead, it simmers below the surface waiting to erupt. There'll be fireworks when it does.
Former actor Jenny Downham is a bestselling novelist. Her first novel, Before I Die, was an international bestseller and sold 1.3 million copies worldwide. It was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, nominated for the Carnegie Medal and the Booktrust Teenage Prize and won the Branford Boase Award. It was also adapted for film and was released as Now is Good in 2012 starring Dakota Fanning. Jenny's second novel, You Against Me, won the inaugural Waterstones Teenage Book Prize in 2012. Her third novel, Unbecoming, was shortlisted for the YA Book Prize 2016 and won the Stonewall Honor Award from the American Library Association in 2017. Jenny lives in London.
Judges: “A fantastic British YA novel - real, honest and occasionally harrowing, but never without humanity
Notes for Editors:
For further press information, or to request an interview with an author, or for book jacket or author images, please contact:
Amanda Johnson
07715 922 180
@CostaBookAwards
About the Costa Book Awards:
- The Costa Book Awards, formerly the Whitbread Book Awards, were established in 1971 to encourage, promote and celebrate some of the most enjoyable and best books published each year.
- The total prize fund for the Costa Book Awards – including the Costa Short Story Award - stands at £60,000.
- The award winners from the five categories - Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book - each receive £5,000.
- The overall Costa Book of the Year is selected from the five category Award winners with the winner receiving a further £30,000.
- The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony in central London on 28th January, 2020.
- To be eligible for the 2019 awards, books must have been first published in the UK or Ireland between 1 November 2018 and 31 October 2019.
- The 2018 Costa Book of the Year was The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es (Fig Tree).
Founded in London by Italian brothers Sergio and Bruno Costa in 1971, Costa Coffee operates over 2,600+ coffee shops in the UK and more than 1,300+ in 31 international markets and are proud to be the UK's favourite coffee shop, having been awarded “Best Branded Coffee Shop Chain in the UK and Ireland" by Allegra Strategies for nine years running (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018).
Making a positive contribution to the communities we are part of is extremely important to us, both here in the UK and across the world. That's why we established The Costa Foundation, a registered charity with the aim of improving the life chances of children in coffee growing communities by helping them access a safe, quality education. So far, the Costa Foundation has funded over 80 school projects and changed the lives of more than 75,000 children. We also have a UK-wide Community Programme, which enables our teams to volunteer their time to good causes locally and to invite community groups to make use of our welcoming space in store.
In 2011 Costa Coffee purchased Coffee Nation rebranding it to Costa Express. Today, Costa Express operates over 9,000+ coffee bars in nine international markets and proudly serves the same famous Mocha Italia blend found in stores, combined with fresh milk to create a delicious and warming cup of coffee on the go.
