Sex, sore feet, and a 90-year-old up for the Costa
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Your support makes all the difference.A 90-year-old, whose work is described as a biographical account of "sex, love and sore feet", as well as impending death, has been shortlisted for the Costa book awards.
Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End has made it to the final few contenders in a competition that pits experience against youth as well as up-and-coming writers against established authors.
Athill, who worked for the BBC in the Second World War and helped set up André Deutsch publishers, has already written five volumes of memoir, including the highly-acclaimed Stet. She is the oldest writer shortlisted for the prize, and is three years older than Doris Lessing who last year became the oldest writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Costa judges whittled 616 submissions down to 25 books. Known as the Whitbread before it was taken over by the coffee chain in 2006, the competition is unique in bringing together adult and children's fiction as well as biography and poetry. The overall winner will be announced in January and will receive £25,000.
The youngest contender is the Liverpool-born Jennie Rooney, a 28-year-old lawyer who completed her first novel Inside the Whale during lunch breaks from her legal practice. She will find herself competing in the first-novel category against Sadie Jones, daughter of a Jamaican poet, Evan Jones. Sadie Jones's debut, The Outcast, set in post-war suburban England, has already been shortlisted for the all-female Orange Prize. The only man to make it on to the first-novel shortlist is a former screen writer, Tom Rob Smith, whose Stalinist-era Child 44 was described as "unputdownable".
This year's judges include the author Lisa Jewell; the actress and writer Pauline McLynn; the journalist and broadcaster Michael Buerk; the poet Roger McGough; and the writer Victoria Hislop. A final panel of judges, to include a member of the book-reading public, will be announced next month.
And the nominees are... The shortlist
Biography Award
Somewhere Towards The End, Diana Athill
Bloomsbury Ballerina, Judith Mackrell
If You Don't Know Me By Now, Sathnam Sanghera
Chagall, Jackie Wullschlager
Novel Award
The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry
The Other Hand, Chris Cleave
A Partisan's Daughter, Louis de Bernières
Trauma, Patrick McGrath
First Novel Award
The Behaviour Of Moths, Poppy Adams
The Outcast, Sadie Jones
Inside The Whale, Jennie Rooney
Child 44, Tom Rob Smith
Poetry Award
For All We Know, Ciaran Carson
The Broken Word, Adam Foulds
Sunday At The Skin Launderette, Kathryn Simmonds
Salvation Jane, Greta Stoddart
Children's Book Award
Ostrich Boys, Keith Gray
The Carbon Diaries 2015, Saci Lloyd
Just Henry, Michelle Magorian
Broken Soup, Jenny Valentine
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