Costa Book Awards: Jonathan Coe wins with Brexit-themed book hailed by judges as 'perfect novel for now'
Sara Collins wins in the first novel category
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Your support makes all the difference.Jonathan Coe has won a Costa Book Award for his Brexit-themed novel Middle England.
The book, billed as a story of ”nostalgia and delusion”, was one of several winners announced on Monday. It distinguished itself in the novel category.
Judges described it as “the perfect novel for now”.
Lawyer-turned-writer Sara Collins, meanwhile, won the prize for the best first novel for The Confessions Of Frannie Langton.
Collins’s debut features a “twisted love affair” between a Jamaican maid and her French mistress in Georgian London.
The “gothic romance” was inspired by the story of a Jamaican boy, Francis Barber, sent into service in the household of Samuel Johnson.
Collins, who is of Jamaican descent, worked in the Cayman Islands as a dispute resolution lawyer for 17 years and was also involved in human rights advocacy.
She wanted to “dispel the myth that the black presence in England started with Windrush” with the book.
Debut authors scooped two other categories, with Jasbinder Bilan winning the children’s book award with her first novel, Asha And The Spirit Bird, “a thrilling adventure set in contemporary India”.
Mary Jean Chan won the poetry award with her debut collection, Fleche, exploring “themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history”.
The Volunteer: The True Story Of The Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz, by former war reporter Jack Fairweather, won the biography category.
Witold Pilecki created an underground resistance army which smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities out of Auschwitz, via secret messages and radio broadcasts.
The five winning authors each receive £5,000 and are now in the running for the 2019 Costa Book Of The Year award, which will be announced later this month.
Additional reporting by agencies
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