Couple's prize battle opens new chapter in literary rivalry

The authors who comprise one of Britain's best-known literary couples became rivals for a leading book prize yesterday after they each succeeded in the initial round of the competition.

Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn, who have been married for almost a decade and a couple for more than 20 years, now look clear front-runners and rivals for Whitbread's Book of the Year title.

When the husband-and-wife team featured on the shortlists, Frayn said: "Whatever the result, we are going to have to be terribly well-behaved about it. We don't want one or the other sulking and moping around."

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Tomalin's acclaimed life of the 17th-century diarist and naval administrator, described by the judges as "a humane, compassionate portrait of a great man", took Whitbread's £5,000 award for the best biography.

Spies, her husband's equally praised tragi-comic novel of a Second World War childhood in suburbia collected the prize for fiction. The Whitbread panel judged it "so subtle" and "beautifully rendered".

The couple's twin victories strike a blow against the notorious age prejudice of British publishing, and for literature as a family business. Both authors will turn 70 this year, and both have commanded respect and affection among their readers for decades.

Their works now go forward, with three other sectional Whitbread winners, to compete for the Book of the Year title. The winner of the overall prize, worth an additional £25,000, will be announced on 28 January after final judging by a panel that includes the actress Joely Richardson, the poet Wendy Cope and the novelist Joanna Trollope, under the chairmanship of Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye.

Frayn and Tomalin appear the strongest contenders. The field also includes Paul Farley's poetry collection Ice Age, Hilary McKay's children's novel Saffy's Angel, and the winner of the first novel category: Norman Lebrecht's The Song of Names. Both the poetry and children's victors, although accomplished, look comparatively lightweight when measured against the latest figures from those genres to take the Whitbread: Seamus Heaney and (in 2002) Philip Pullman.

Lebrecht's fictional debut suffers the bad luck to tackle, just like Frayn, the themes of wartime childhood and exile from Hitler's Europe. Lebrecht, a journalist, shows energy and panache but less narrative cunning than Frayn. Little seems to stand in the way of a marital head-to-head later this month.

Frayn, born in north London in 1933, made a name as a humorous columnist after leaving Cambridge University.

At the same time, he embarked on a versatile career as satirical novelist, comic and philosophical dramatist, and translator of Russian literature. His previous novel, Headlong, reached the Booker shortlist in 1999, while his 1998 play, Copenhagen, proved a critical and popular hit in London and New York.

Tomalin, also a Cambridge graduate, worked as literary editor for the New Statesman and The Sunday Times. Her first husband, the foreign correspondent Nick Tomalin, was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur war of 1973.

Tomalin published her debut biography, of Mary Wollstonecraft, in 1974. Later she went on to produce a ground-breaking study of Dickens's mistress, Ellen Ternan, and, in 1997, an original portrait of Jane Austen.

THE WINNERS

NOVEL: Michael Frayn, Spies (Faber & Faber)

During the Second World War, in the quiet heart of Home Counties suburbia, a schoolboy comes to believe that his best friend's mother is a German spy. Funny but poignant, packed with sly surprises and moving revelations, Frayn's period piece mixes an exquisite sense of atmosphere with a tough-minded scrutiny of childhood's delusions.

FIRST NOVEL: Norman Lebrecht, The Song of Names (Review)

In the early 1950s, a virtuoso violinist who fled Poland as a child refugee from Nazism goes Awol on the day of his first big classical recital. Four decades later, his best boyhood friend goes in search of the long-vanished prodigy. A witty and pacy account of genius and its costs.

POETRY: Paul Farley, The Ice Age (Picador)

Paul McCartney meets Philip Larkin in an accessible and musical second collection. The poet turns fragments of his working-class Merseyside childhood into carefully shaped narratives that mingle nostalgia with frustration. The wider world of knowledge – geology, archaeology, ornithology – broaden his horizons beyond 1970s Liverpool.

CHILDREN'S: Hilary McKay, Saffy's Angel (Hodder)

As an adopted middle child, Saffron has to fight for her place in an artist's bohemian family, packed with wayward characters. Friendship with a disabled girl, and a trip to Italy to find a stone angel bequeathed by her grandfather, help her to secure a safer role in this colourfully drawn tribe.

BIOGRAPHY: Claire Tomalin, The Unequalled Self (Viking)

Known for his 10-year diary of lechery and intrigue in Restoration London, Samuel Pepys also helped to create the modern Navy in his role as a far-sighted administrator. Tomalin's engrossing life stitches his private foibles and public career into a seamless tapestry, full of comedy and pathos: a warts-and-all portrait of the naked civil servant.