Costa Novel Award

• Family Album by Penelope Lively
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Elephant Keeper by Christopher
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

As for the first novel award, I’ve never heard of any of them, so I really can’t comment.

Costa First Novel Award

• The Finest Type of English Womanhood by Rachel Heath
• John the Revelator by Peter Murphy
• Beauty by Raphael Selbourne
• The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

Surely the smart money will be on either Simon Gray or William Fiennes for the biography category?

Costa Biography Award

• The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo
• The Music Room by William Fiennes
• Coda by Simon Gray
• Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorhead

Interesting to see Clive James up for the poetry award, and I wonder whether the controversy over Ruth Padel’s campaign to be Oxford Professor of Poetry will overshadow her nomination?

Costa Poetry Award

• Angels of Elsinore by Clive James
• One Eye’d Leigh by Katharine Kilalea
• Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
• A Scattering by Christopher Reid

And how nice to see a posthumous shortlisting for Siobhan Dowd, who sadly died of cancer in 2007.

Costa Children’s Book Award

• Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd
• Troubador by Mary Hoffman
• The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
• Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera

The category award winners will be announced on January 5th 2010, with the final winner being announced on January 26th.

… towards the end of last year there was a meeting of writers and Waterstone’s staff at the Piccadilly branch, organised by the Society of Authors. It was a well-intentioned and profoundly depressing experience. When Wendy Cope asked about the sale of poetry, she was answered after a long, embarrassed pause by the very nice woman who looks after non-fiction. Deborah Moggach asked a question or two and learned that literary fiction was not on the whole welcome in the shop. In fact, the word “literary” is death to sales – and perhaps literary biography is worst of all.

I really hope this apparent trend doesn’t perpetuate. Over the last couple of years I’ve really discovered literary biographies as a genre and when I’ve not been knee-deep in uni work I’ve been enjoying them immensely. Indeed, I’m currently frustratingly close to the end of The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin. I’ve only about 70 pages to go, but That Damned Essay just keeps getting in the way. It’s brilliant, by the way, and unless the last 70 pages are so unspeakably awful that it ruins the entire book – and I doubt that will be the case – I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending it to all you interested in one of the greatest figures in feminist/women’s history.

But why does the word ‘literary’ strike such fear into the hearts of some readers? I must say that the word actually sells me the book, rather than dissuades me from buying it. Perhaps I am preaching to the converted in the blogosphere, but how many people really find the concept so scary? Is it that they feel the book will be “too clever” for them… or do they feel that literature is too elitist? I must say that it’s never struck me as such, but maybe I’m an exception. It’s an interesting question, I think, and I’d love to hear your views on it.

Incidentally, Michael Holroyd’s most recent book A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families looks utterly marvellous and I’m desperate for a copy. But not this side of the essay and the dissertation, I fear. You can read the whole of Holroyd’s Guardian piece here.