COSTA BOOK AWARDS SHORTLIST
We're delighted to see THREE recent PBS Selections on the Costa Book Awards shortlist. Launched in 1971, the Costa Book Awards is one of the UK's most prestigious and popular book prizes and celebrates the most enjoyable books of the year by writers resident in the UK and Ireland. Uniquely, the prize has five categories – First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book – with one of the five winning books selected as the overall Costa Book of the year in January 2022.
The Poetry category shortlist is:
All The Names Given by Raymond Antrobus (Picador)
All The Names Given continues Antrobus’s investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory. Punctuated with [Caption Poems] which attempt to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems, as well as moments inside and outside of them, Antrobus breaks new ground in form and content resulting in a timely, humane and tender book.
A Blood Condition by Kayo Chingonyi (Chatto & Windus
A Blood Condition tells a story of inheritance – the people, places, cultures and memories that form us. Kayo Chingonyi explores how distance and time, nations and a century’s history, can collapse within a body; our past continuous in our present. From London, Leeds, and The North East to the banks of the Zambezi river, these poems consider change and permanence, grief, joy and the painful ongoing process of letting go.
The Kids by Hannah Lowe (Bloodaxe Books)
Hannah Lowe’s third collection The Kids is a book of sonnets about teaching, learning, growing up and parenthood. It draws on Hannah’s decade of teaching in an inner-city London sixth form during the 2000s, as well as on her own coming of age in the riotous 80s and 90s and concludes with poems about her young son learning to negotiate contemporary London.
Eat Or We Both Starve by Victoria Kennefick (Carcanet Press)
Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it.
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