The shortlist for the 2009 Costa Book Awards, given for books published in the current year by writers living in the United Kingdom, was announced earlier today. Among the finalists are Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel and poet Ruth Padel, nominated for a collection centered on her great great grandfather, Charles Darwin. The prizes, formerly the Whitbread Literary Awards (they now take the name of their sponsor, a popular U.K. coffee chain), recognize the year's "most enjoyable books" in the categories of poetry, novel, and first novel.
The finalists are, in poetry:
Clive James for Angels Over Elsinore (Picador Poetry)
Katharine Kilalea for One Eye’d Leigh (Carcanet)
Ruth Padel for Darwin: A Life in Poems (Chatto & Windus)
Christopher Reid for A Scattering (Arete Books)
In the novel:
Penelope Lively for Family Album (Fig Tree)
Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate)
Christopher Nicholson for The Elephant Keeper (Fourth Estate)
Colm Tóibίn for Brooklyn (Viking)
In first novel:
Rachel Heath for The Finest Type of English Womanhood (Hutchinson)
Peter Murphy for John the Revelator (Faber and Faber)
Raphael Selbourne for Beauty (Tindal Street Press)
Ali Shaw for The Girl with Glass Feet (Atlantic Books)
The winner in each category, announced on January 5, will receive five thousand pounds (approximately eight thousand dollars). A "Book of the Year" selected from among the works of the genre winners will be awarded twenty-five thousand pounds (approximately forty thousand dollars). The overall honoree will be revealed on January 26.