Facts about Costa Book Awards
- 10
Book sales increased dramatically for Costa Award winners, with shortlisted novels experiencing average sales bumps of 2000 copies per week during the voting period.
- 09
Margaret Atwood's The Testaments won the Costa Book Award for Novel in 2019, making it one of the most acclaimed literary prizes for the sequel to her 1985 dystopian masterpiece.
- 08
Joanne Harris's Chocolat won the Costa Book Award for First Novel in 1999, launching her international career and becoming one of the prize's most commercially successful debuts.
- 07
Poet Seamus Heaney won the Costa Book Award for Poetry in 1990, cementing the prize's recognition of verse alongside prose in British and Irish literature.
- 06
Five shortlisted books in the Costa Book Awards compete annually for the overall Book of the Year prize, which carries a significantly larger monetary award than the individual category winners.
- 05
Every Costa Book Award winner receives a specially commissioned bronze figurine designed by sculptor Philip Jackson, symbolizing the prize's prestige among British and Irish literary honors.
- 04
Authors must have been resident in the UK or Ireland for at least three years to be eligible for the Costa Book Awards, ensuring the prize recognizes writers with significant ties to these countries.
- 03
Young adult fiction has dominated the Costa Book Awards Children's Category since its inception, with over 70 percent of winners since 2000 featuring teenage protagonists.
- 02
In 2012, Ali Smith became the first author to win the Costa Book Award in two different categories, claiming both the Novel Award and the overall Book of the Year prize.
- 01
The Costa Book Awards, established in 1971 by the Costa Coffee company, have awarded over 50 million pounds in prize money across five categories to British and Irish authors.