Women fill Costa Book of the Year shortlist

LONDON - Women have taken all four slots on the shortlist for best novel of 2013 in the Costa Book Awards, a competition for authors who live in Britain or Ireland. The winners will be announced in January.

Kate Atkinson is shortlisted for her novel ‘Life After Life’, the organisers of the competition said on Tuesday. She won the Book of the Year prize for her first novel, ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’, in 1995, when the competition was called the Whitbread awards.

She is joined on the shortlist by the late Bernardine Bishop for ‘Unexpected Lessons in Love’, former novel award winner Maggie O'Farrell for ‘Instructions for a Heatwave’ and Evie Wyld for ‘All the Birds, Singing’.

The winners of the five Costa book awards categories are announced on January 6, with each winner receiving a prize of 5 000 pounds (about R83 294). The Costa Book of the Year winner is announced on January 28 and receives a prize of 30 000 pounds.

Following are the authors and books shortlisted in the other four categories:

Costa First Novel Award shortlist

Sam Byers for ‘Idiopathy’ (Fourth Estate)

Kate Clanchy for ‘Meeting the English’ (Picador)

Nathan Filer for ‘The Shock of the Fall’ (HarperCollinsPublishers)

Sathnam Sanghera for ‘Marriage Material’ (William Heinemann)

2013 Costa Biography Award shortlist

Gavin Francis for ‘Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins’ (Chatto & Windus)

Thomas Harding for ‘Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz’ (William Heinemann)

Lucy Hughes-Hallett for ‘The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War’ (Fourth Estate)

Olivia Laing for ‘The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink’ (Canongate)

2013 Costa Poetry Award shortlist