Edinburgh based author Maggie O’Farrell has been shortlisted in the Novel award category of the Costa Book Awards 2016 which have just been announced. Her novel This Must be the Place published by Tinder Press is up against competition from Sebastian Barry, Sarah Perry and Rose Tremain.
This is the only book award open solely to authors who actually live in the UK and Ireland and whose books have been published in the last year.
There were 596 entries this year no doubt giving the judges a lot to do! They included writers Nicci Gerrard, Andrew O’Hagan, Mary Loudon, Matthew Dennison, poet author and blogger Jen Campbell and author-illustrator Cressida Cowell.
The winner of each category receives £5,000 and these prizes will be announced on 3 January 2017. But the overall winner gets £30,000 and that announcement will not be made until the Costa Book Awards ceremony in London on 31 January.
“I’m certain that readers of all tastes will find something to enjoy in this fantastic selection of books,” commented Dominic Paul, Managing Director of Costa. “My thanks go to the category judges who read so extensively and chose so carefully, and many congratulations to the shortlisted authors. We’re very proud of our heritage and connection with the Book Awards at Costa and we wish them all great success.”
The Costa Book Awards were first established in 1971. Last year’s winner was The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan Children’s Books).
Maggie O’Farrell’s book:
This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)
Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex-film star given to shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway. He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with twenty years ago, and this discovery will send him off-course, far away from wife and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?
Maggie O’Farrell is the author of seven novels: After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award and This Must be the Place. She lives in Edinburgh.
Judges: “An utterly involving read, both funny and heartbreaking – technically dazzling, but never losing its human touch.”
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