Costa Book of the Year Awards: Hannah Lowe’s The Kids and the previous winners to read

Poet Hannah Lowe’s winning third collection of sonnets draws on a decade of experience teaching sixth-form students in an inner-city London school during the 2000s. Other verses in the tome take inspiration from her teenage years growing up in the Eighties and Nineties, as well as her own motherhood and experience of raising a small son in the nation’s capital. The judges praised it as a “page turner” that made them “want to punch the air with joy”. “It’s joyous, it’s warm and it’s completely universal,” the chair of judges, BBC News journalist and broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti, said.

Last year’s crowned book is based upon a Taino legend of a woman who transforms into a mermaid. Set on an imaginary Caribbean island called Black Conch, it tells the story of a fisherman, David, who while waiting for a catch, attracts an unexpected sea-dweller, Aycayia – a woman cursed to live as a mermaid by women jealous of her beauty. The moving mythical novel is pierced by a realism that touches on themes of loss, love, family and friendship.

This gripping work of non-fiction took the 2019 prize and recounts the incredible but almost forgotten story of Witold Pelecki during the Second World War. Tasked with uncovering the fate of thousands of people interned at Auschwitz, the Polish resistance agent entered the camp and his underground army began smuggling vital evidence of Nazi atrocities back to Allied forces. Told by former war reporter Jack Fairweather, the enthralling story of resistance helps to illuminate a hero while providing a new and important narrative of the Holocaust.

Part history, part memoir, Bart van Es explores his own family history and the moving account of a Jewish girl’s survival in the Netherlands during the Second World War. The poignant and haunting read explores the Nazi era as well as its lasting effects on those who lived through it.

The second posthumous winner in the Costa prize’s history, poet and author Helen Dunmore’s Inside the Wave explores the writer’s terminal cancer diagnosis in the form of a collection of poems. Reflecting on her own life and her impending death, Dunmore offers a series of deeply moving and tender considerations on the ebbs and flows of life.