Friday 21 January 2011

Costa Book Awards Category Winners announced

The Hand That First Held MineCosta has announced the Costa Book Awards 2010 winners in the Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book categories. The winner in each category receives £5,000. One of these five books will be selected as the overall winner of the Costa Book of the Year award and will receive a further £30,000. The Costa Novel Award was won by Maggie O'Farrell for her fifth book The Hand That First Held Mine. The award is O’Farrell’s first major literary prize. The novel cuts between two time frames; the present day with two new parents struggling to get a grip on the change in their lives, and fifty years earlier in bohemian Soho, where the newly-arrived Lexie Sinclair throws herself into the London art scene. Kishwar Desai won the debut novel prize for Witness the Night, a story exposing the hidden scandal of female infanticide that still exists in India. Edmund de Waal collected the Biography Award for his highly-acclaimed memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes. The book, which uses 264 delicate Japanese carvings to tell the extraordinary story of a family living through tumultous events in Paris and Vienna, has become a bestseller and has been described by one critic as the "book of the decade". Debut writer Jason Wallace claimed the Children's Book Award for Out of Shadows, a moving and disturbing coming-of-age story set in Zimbabwe. The Costa Poetry Award was won by Jo Shapcott for her collection Of Mutability. The poems are rooted in the poet's experience of breast cancer but are all about life, hope and play. The Hare with Amber Eyes is the bookmakers' favourite to collect the overall prize which will be announced on January 25th.

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