Whitbread Group PLC today announced the 2005 Whitbread Book Award winners in the Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book categories.
Ali Smith scoops the Novel Award for The Accidental.
Outsider Tash Aw beats Rachel Zadok to take First Novel Award for The Harmony Silk Factory.
Kate Thompson beats three-times Whitbread winner Geraldine McCaughrean to take the Children’s Book Award with The New Policeman.
Hilary Spurling claims the Biography Award with the second part of her masterful biography of Matisse, Matisse the Master, a work which took her 15 years to complete.
Christopher Logue with the fifth and penultimate instalment of his celebrated account of the Iliad, Cold Calls, is the winner of the Poetry Award.
The five Whitbread Book Award winners above, each of whom will receive £5,000, were selected from 476 entries, the highest total ever received in one year. The five books are now eligible for the ultimate prize - the 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year.
The winner of the overall Whitbread Book of the Year will be announced at The Brewery in central London on Tuesday 24th January 2006 by a panel of judges chaired by the author and former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo MBE.
Members of the public can vote via the Whitbread Book Awards website for which of the five books they would select as Whitbread Book of the Year. Everyone who votes will be entered into a free prize draw to win a set of the five category winners. A chart showing the most hotly-tipped book according to the public vote will also be available on the website.
For comments see The Guardian: Literary honours for some newish names and a rather old one, The Independent: Forty years after he began it, poet wins prize for epic work and The Times: Whitbread winners announced.
Update [25 Jan 2006]
Secret life of Matisse wins Whitbread prize
[from The Guardian] The most undeniably solid prose talent left in this year’s Whitbread prize stayed the course through a desperately close last round of judging last night and won the £30,000 book of the year award by a whisker.
The 512-page second [and final] instalment of Hilary Spurling’s monumental biography of Matisse, astonishingly the first of the master modernist who died 52 years ago, beat off a challenge which was less stiff than it might have been because so many of the year’s leading titles fell at earlier stages of judging. […]
Spurling, who spent 15 years writing and researching her two-part biography of the French artist, said she was “gobsmacked”, adding: “My money was placed elsewhere.”
Author Michael Morpurgo, who chaired the judging panel, said the biography was “an extraordinary achievement”. He added: “It has opened our eyes to great art, and done it in an extraordinary way.”