1997 Whitbread Awards

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The Whitbread Awards (19712005), called Costa Book Awards since 2006, are literary awards in the United Kingdom, awarded both for high literary merit but also for works considered enjoyable reading. This page gives details of the awards given in the year 1997 .

Costa Book Awards annual series of literary awards in five categories

The Costa Book Awards are a set of annual literary awards recognizing English-language books by writers based in Britain and Ireland. They were inaugurated for 1971 publications and known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2006 when Costa Coffee, a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship. The companion Costa Short Story Award was established in 2012.

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1997.

Contents

Awards

Book of the Year

Children's Book

Shortlist

<i>Harry and the Wrinklies</i>

Harry and the Wrinklies is a children's novel written by British author Alan Temperley. The book was published in paperback in February 1998 by Scholastic. It was Temperley's second published novel, after Murdo's War in 1988. A sequel, Harry and the Treasure of Eddie Carver, was released in hardback in March 2004.

Sharon Creech American writer of childrens novels

Sharon Creech is an American writer of children's novels. She was the first American winner of the Carnegie Medal for British children's books and the first person to win both the American Newbery Medal and the British Carnegie.

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First Novel

Shortlist

Anne Haverty is an Irish novelist and poet. Haverty was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the Sorbonne and in 1992 won a scholarship to the European Film School at Ebeltoft in Denmark. Among Haverty's novels, One Day as a Tiger won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1997.

<i>One Day as a Tiger</i> novel by Irish author Anne Haverty

One Day as a Tiger is the first novel by Irish author Anne Haverty. Published in 1997 it was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award that year and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

Mick Jackson is a British writer from England, best known for his novel The Underground Man (1997). The book, based on the life of William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and for the 1997 Whitbread Award for best first novel.

Novel

Shortlist

John Banville Irish writer, also known as Benjamin Black, novelist, adapter and screenwriter

William John Banville, who writes as John Banville and sometimes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. Recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators, Banville is considered to be "one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today." He has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov."

The Untouchable (novel) 1997 John Banville novel

The Untouchable is a 1997 novel by the Irish writer John Banville. The book is written as a roman à clef, presented from the point of view of the art historian, double agent and homosexual Victor Maskell—a character based largely on Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt and in part on Irish poet Louis MacNeice. The character of Guy Burgess is prominent and easily identifiable, that of Maclean plays a minor role only.

Bernard MacLaverty is a Northern Irish writer of fiction. His novels include Lamb, Cal, Grace Notes and The Anatomy School. He has written five books of short stories.

Biography

Shortlist

Kate Summerscale is an English writer and journalist.

Stella Tillyard is an English author and historian born on 16 January 1957, best known for her popular work Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740–1832, which was made into a BBC mini-series in 1999.

Jennifer Sheila Uglow OBE is a British biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.

Poetry

Shortlist

Simon Armitage Poet, playwright, novelist

Simon Robert Armitage, is an English poet, playwright and novelist. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds. On 19 June 2015, Armitage was elected to the part-time position of Oxford Professor of Poetry, succeeding Geoffrey Hill.

Selima Hill is a British poet.

Christopher Reid British poet

Christopher John Reid, FRSL is a Hong Kong-born British poet, essayist, cartoonist, and writer. In January 2010 he won the 2009 Costa Book Award for A Scattering, written as a tribute to his late wife, the actress Lucinda Gane. Beside winning the poetry category, Reid became the first poet to take the overall Costa Book of the Year since Seamus Heaney in 1999. He had been nominated for Whitbread Awards in 1996 and in 1997.

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Sylvia Plath American poet, novelist and short story writer

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1998.

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<i>Venus and Adonis</i> (Shakespeare poem) narrative poem by Shakespeare

Venus and Adonis is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare published in 1593. It is probably Shakespeare's first publication.

Tales from Ovid is a poetical work written by the English poet Ted Hughes. Published in 1997 by Faber and Faber, it is a retelling of twenty-four tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It won the Whitbread Book Of The Year Award for 1997 and has been translated into several languages. It was one of his last published works along with Birthday Letters. Four of the tales were previously published in After Ovid, New Metamorphosis, edited by M. Hofmann and J. Ladun.

Adrian Mitchell FRSL was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's anti-Bomb movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him "the British Mayakovsky".

Timothy "Tim" Supple[1] is a British born, award-winning international theatre director.

The WH Smith Literary Award was an award founded in 1959 by British high street retailer W H Smith. Its founding aim was stated to be to "encourage and bring international esteem to authors of the British Commonwealth"; originally open to all residents of the UK, the Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland, it latterly admitted foreign works in translation and works by US authors. The final three winners were Americans, and 2005 was the award's final year.

<i>Birthday Letters</i> book by Ted Hughes

Birthday Letters, published in 1998, is a collection of poetry by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes's death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized and "explosive" marriage.

Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar. He specialises in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric, and Honorary Fellow of Creativity at Warwick Business School. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education.

Diane Middlebrook biographer

Diane Helen Wood Middlebrook was an American biographer, poet, and teacher. She taught feminist studies for many years at Stanford University. She is best known for critically acclaimed biographies of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, and jazz musician Billy Tipton. Middlebrook was preparing a biography of the Roman poet Ovid, to be published in 2008. Her death brought that project to a close.

<i>Half-Life</i> (Krach novel) novel by Aaron Krach

Half-Life is a debut novel by Aaron Krach. Published in 2004 by Alyson Books, the novel was nominated for a Violet Quill Award and was among the 2004 Lambda Literary Award finalists. It discusses young love, coping with death and the issues facing gay youth.

Felice Picano American writer

Felice Picano is an American writer, publisher, and critic who has encouraged the development of gay literature in the United States. His work is documented in many sources.

Willow Dawson is a Canadian cartoonist and illustrator, whose works include The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea with author Helaine Becker, Hyena in Petticoats: The Story of Suffragette Nellie McClung, Lila and Ecco's Do-It-Yourself Comics Club, 100 Mile House, the graphic novel No Girls Allowed, with author Susan Hughes, and Violet Miranda: Girl Pirate, with author Emily Pohl-Weary. Her works have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
Her black and white comics art style is wonderful: bold and full of thought. Dawson also creates painted stand alone illustrations which she turns into prints and sells on her Society6 site. The original art is created using acrylic ink and paint on recycled cardboard. Her illustrations convey a mood of whimsy and playful-uncanny. Her work typically exhibits flowing linework and favours a 50's colour palette.
She is a member of The RAID Studio, The Writers' Union of Canada, Illustration Mundo, and JacketFlap.
Dawson was born in 1975 and grew up in Vancouver, BC. She currently lives in a creaky-old-house-turned-music-school in downtown Toronto.

References