Costa Book Awards 2009 category winners announced

One winner is selected in each of the five categories - Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book. Each category-winning author receives £5,000.

This year's Costa Book Awards 2009 category award winners are:

2009 Costa Novel Award Winner
Colm Toibin - Brooklyn

2009 Costa First Novel Award Winner
Raphael Selbourne - Beauty

2009 Costa Biography Award Winner
Graham Farmelo - The Strangest Man

2009 Costa Poetry Award Winner
Christopher Reid- A Scattering

2009 Costa Children's Book Award Winner
Patrick Ness - The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, Book Two)

The TV Book Club on Channel 4 (UK)

The 10-part series of The TV Book Club is sponsored by opticians chain Specsavers and produced by Cactus TV, the team behind the Richard & Judy Book Club. It begins on digital channel More4 on Sunday 17th January, with repeats on daytime Channel 4. Chosen titles are:

17th January: The Little Stranger Sarah Waters (Little, Brown)
24th January: Blacklands Belinda Bauer (Transworld)
31st January Sacred Hearts Sarah Dunant (Little, Brown)
7th February Juliet, Naked Nick Hornby (Penguin)
14th February Cutting for Stone Abraham Verghese (Random House)
21st February The Rapture Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury)
28th February Brixton Beach Roma Tearne (HarperCollins)
7th March The Way Home George Pelecanos (Orion)
14th March Wedlock Wendy Moore (Orion)
21st March The Silver Linings Play Book Matthew Quick (Macmillan)

P.D. James, Talking And Writing 'Detective Fiction'

P.D. James, the author of the Adam Dalgliesh mystery series, has a new book, a nonfiction work called Talking About Detective Fiction. She tells Linda Wertheimer of NPR why we might be entering a second "golden age" for the detective story

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Judges for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction announced

"The judging panel for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is announced today, Wednesday 9 December 2009. The judges are Rosie Blau, Literary Editor of the Financial Times; Deborah Bull, formerly a dancer, now Creative Director of the Royal Opera House as well as a writer and broadcaster; Tom Sutcliffe, journalist, broadcaster and author and Frances Wilson, biographer and critic. Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, was announced as Chair of the Judges in November"
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2009 BBC National Short Story Award winner

The winner of the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award is Kate Clanchy for The Not-Dead and the Saved
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Pan Macmillan launches Peter James app

"With a unique series design, the Peter James app features special content exclusive to the iPhone app edition of Dead Tomorrow. Dead Simple, the first of the Roy Grace series, is bundled in as a free ebook. The app will also have a coverflow feature allowing users to browse and buy the other titles in the Roy Grace series. The Peter James app provides many extra features, including:

- a situation call from DS Roy Grace himself
- Peter James's research notes and colour photographs
- an extensive author interview
- previously unseen edited (by Maria Rejt) manuscript pages from Dead Tomorrow showing how the book has evolved from first draft

Coinciding with the paperback publication of Dead Tomorrow, advertising tagging the Peter James app is running on London buses, with posters across buses in the West End, the City and central London. Produced in collaboration with Missing Ink Studios and Things Made Out of Other Things,

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John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2009 winner - Evie Wyld

"29-year-old Evie Wyld saw off competition from an exceptional shortlist which included the Booker winner Aravind Adiga and Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2009 with her book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice. The novel, which was published to rave reviews in August 2009, is set in eastern Australia and tells a story of fathers and sons, their wars and the things that they will never know about each other. Following the collapse of his marriage, Frank retreats to a small costal community in an attempt to build a new life for himself, away from the horrors of his violent past. Frank's story is set against the struggles of his own father, Leon, who forty years earlier, is forced to depart from life working in his family's suburban cake shop to face horrors of his own in the war in Vietnam. Wyld, who was named one of Granta's New Voices of 2008, received her cheque for GBP5,000 at a ceremony at the Century Club in Piccadilly" Evie Wyld's website

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