COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD WINNER 2018

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton Raven Books

About the book: At a party thrown by her parents, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed – again. She’s been murdered hundreds of times, and each day Aidan Bishop is too late to save her. The only way to break this cycle is to identify Evelyn’s killer. But every time the day begins again, Aidan wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is desperate to stop him ever escaping Blackheath......

About the author: After graduating with a degree in English and Philosophy, Stuart Turton stocked shelves in a Darwin bookshop, taught English in Shanghai, worked for a technology magazine in London, wrote travel articles in Dubai, and now is a freelance journalist. Turton is the winner of the Brighton and Hove Short Story Prize and was longlisted for the BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines competition. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, his debut novel, has sold in twenty territories and been optioned for TV by House Productions. It was longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger, and was shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards, the HWA Crown Awards and the Dead Good Reader Awards. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is the Netgalley Book of the Year for 2018 and the winner of the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Novel. Stuart Turton lives in London with his wife and daughter.

What the judges said: “This ingenious, intriguing and highly original mindbender of a murder mystery gripped us all. We were all stunned that this exciting and accomplished novel, planned and plotted perfectly, is a debut. Fresh, enticing and completely unputdownable.”

COSTA NOVEL AWARD WINNER 2018

Normal People by Sally Rooney Faber & Faber

About the book: Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner who has learnt from painful experience to stay away from her classmates. When the two strike up a conversation in Marianne’s kitchen — awkward but electrifying — something life-changing begins.

About the author: Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin. She is the youngest-ever winner of the Sunday Times PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. Her first novel Conversations with Friends was a Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard Book of the Year, receiving the most mentions in the end of year round-ups for a debut book in 2017. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, London Review of Books and Granta, and she is the editor of The Stinging Fly. Conversations with Friends was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. In 2017, Sally was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. In 2018, Normal People was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won the Waterstones Book of the Year (making her the youngest-ever recipient) and won the Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards. Sally is currently writing the screenplay for the BBC TV adaptation of Normal People directed by Oscar-nominated director Lenny Abrahamson (Room).

What the judges said: “A trailblazing novel about modern life and love that will electrify any reader.”

COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD WINNER 2018

The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es Fig Tree

About the book: The last time Lien saw her parents was in The Hague, when she was collected at the door by a stranger and taken to a foster family far away to be hidden from the Nazis. What was her side of the story, Bart van Es – a grandson of the couple who looked after Lien – wondered? What really happened during the war, and after? So began an investigation that would consume and transform both Bart van Es’s life and Lien’s. The Cut Out Girl braids together a powerful recreation of Lien’s harrowing childhood story with the present-day account of Bart’s efforts to piece that story together. And it embraces the wider picture too, for Holland was more cooperative in rounding up Jews for the Nazis than any other Western European country. This is a story about the powerful love and challenges of foster families, and about the ways in which our most painful experiences – so crucial in defining us – can also be redefined.

About the author: Bart van Es was born in 1972 in the Netherlands and grew up in Norway, Dubai and Indonesia as part of an expat family, being schooled in both English and Dutch. In 1986 the family moved permanently to the UK, where Bart went on to study English at Cambridge, gaining a First. In 1999, Bart won a Research Fellowship at Christ Church, University of Oxford. Whilst there he published Spenser’s Forms of History and A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies. 2004 saw him elected to a Fellowship at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he is now a Professor in Renaissance Literature. His former students include the prize-winning authors Katherine Rundell, Caroline Bird and Hannah Sullivan. Bart’s most important academic book, Shakespeare in Company (2013), was the first work systematically to analyze the literary impact of the playwright’s working relations with fellow actors and dramatists. This book was followed by Shakespeare’s Comedies: A Very Short Introduction in 2016. In 2014, Bart began to look into his family’s wartime history, knowing that his grandparents had been part of the Dutch resistance. He knew of a Jewish girl, Lien, who had lived in hiding with the van Es family during the occupation. He also knew that Lien had continued to live with his grandparents as a foster child in the 1950s, but that a row sometime afterwards had led to an acrimonious break. In December 2014 he met Lien for the first time. She was now living in Amsterdam and had kept a great deal of documentation on her life story. This included the letter that her mother had sent to the resistance in which she and her husband gave up their only daughter. Lien had also kept the letter that Bart’s grandmother sent her in 1988, which severed contact for good. These documents and Lien’s testimony sparked off an investigation that would change Bart’s life. The Cut Out Girl is the outcome of his quest to recover Lien’s story. It recounts a stunning narrative of holocaust survival but also the horror of Dutch wartime collaboration. In addition, it looks at the love and the sadness that families can bring us, in the present and in the past. Bart and his family are now very close friends with Lien, who turned 85 last September and is in excellent health. Bart and his wife have three children and live in Oxford. What the judges said: “The hidden gem of the year. Sensational and gripping, and shedding light on some of the most urgent issues of our time, this was our unanimous winner.”

COSTA POETRY AWARD WINNER 2018

Assurances by J.O. Morgan

Jonathan Cape

About the book: A war-poem both historic and frighteningly topical, Assurances begins in the 1950s during a period of vigilance and dread in the middle of the Cold War: the long stand-off between nuclear powers, where the only defence was the threat of mutually-assured destruction. Using a mix of versed and unversed passages, Morgan places moments of calm reflection alongside the tensions inherent in guarding against such a permanent threat. A work of variations and possibilities, we hear the thoughts of those involved who are trying to understand and justify their roles. We examine the lives of civilians who are not aware of the impending danger, as well as those who are. We listen to the whirring minds of machines; to the voice of the bomb itself. We spy on enemy agents: always there, always somewhere close at hand. Assurances is an intimate, dramatic work for many voices - lyrical, anxious, fragmentary and terrifying; a poem about the nuclear stalemate, the deterrent that is still in place today, how it works and how it might fail, and what will vanish if it does.

About the author: J. O. Morgan was born in Edinburgh in 1978 and is the son of a former RAF officer who was involved in maintaining Britain’s Airborne Nuclear Deterrent. Assurances is Morgan’s response to his father’s tremendous responsibility: it eavesdrops on the thoughts of those trying to understand and justify their roles in keeping peace by threatening war. Those overheard include civilians unaware of danger, enemy agents, the whirring machines and even the bomb itself. Morgan, who lives on a farm in the Scottish Borders, is the author of five previous collections. Each, like Assurances, is a single book-length poem. Natural Mechanical (2009), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; its sequel, Long Cuts (2011), shortlisted for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Award; At Maldon (2013), shortlisted for the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award; In Casting Off; and Interference Pattern, shortlisted for the 2016 T S Eliot Prize. Assurances was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

What the judges said: “We were all gripped by this polyphonic book-length poem and dazzled by its originality and inventiveness.”

COSTA CHILDREN’S BOOK AWARD WINNER 2018

The Skylarks’ War by Hilary McKay Macmillan Children’s Books

About the book: Clarry and her older brother Peter live for their summers in Cornwall, staying with their grandparents and running free with their charismatic cousin, Rupert. But normal life resumes each September - boarding school for Peter and Rupert, and a boring life for Clarry at home with her absent father, as the shadow of a terrible war looms ever closer. When Rupert goes off to fight at the front, Clarry feels their skylark summers are finally slipping away from them. Can their family survive this fearful war?

About the author: Hilary was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, the eldest of four girls in a family of readers. Her great interest in Natural History led her to St Andrew’s University, to study Botany and Zoology. Afterwards she lived in Cumbria and Northumberland, earning money in a variety of ways, including bar work, painting and school librarian, before settling down in Derbyshire to work as an analytical chemist. In 1992 her first book was published, and eventually led to a writing career that she combined with lab work for some years, before making the step to full-time writer when her children were very young. To date she has published around sixty books. Her work has been widely translated, and all her longer novels have been published in the US. She maintains her interest in science and conservation, and is involved at a practical level with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and, most recently, with Authors4Oceans. She lives in a small village in deep countryside with her husband, two grown-up children coming and going, and her excellent border collie, Meg.

What the judges said: “As perfect a novel as you could ever want to read.”