29 January 2019
THE CUT OUT GIRL BY BART VAN ES NAMED 2018 COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR
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Costa Coffee announces the Costa Book Awards 2018 winners in the First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book categories.
The five winning authors – one of whose books will be named 2018 Costa Book of the Year on 29th January - are:
Oxford University Professor of English Literature Bart van Es takes the Costa Biography Award for his memoir The Cut Out Girl, the extraordinary true story of a young Jewish girl in Holland during World War II who hides from the Nazis in the homes of an underground network of foster families, one of them the author’s grandparents;
Scottish poet J.O. Morgan, who wins the Costa Poetry Award for Assurances, his sixth book-length work. Morgan's father was an officer in the Royal Air Force involved in the Airborne Nuclear Deterrent in the early years of the Cold War. This forms the basis of Assurances, a dramatic long-form poem using versed and unversed passages and featuring a variety of perspectives and voices affected by the Cold War;
Children’s writer Hilary McKay collects the Costa Children’s Book Award for the second time for The Skylarks’ War, a story following the loves and losses of a family growing up against the backdrop of World War One which the judges called ‘as perfect a novel as you could ever want to read’.
The Costa Book Awards is the only major UK book prize open solely to authors resident in the UK and Ireland and which, uniquely, recognises some of the most enjoyable books across five categories – First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book - published in the last year.
Originally established in 1971 by Whitbread Plc, Costa announced its takeover of the sponsorship of the UK's most prestigious book prize in 2006. 2018 marks the 47th year of the Book Awards.
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