The Costa book of the year prize was announced on Tuesday. Sebastian Barry won it for The Secret Scripture but local resident Adam Foulds created a sensation by being an extraordinarily close runner up for his narrative poem The Broken Word.
Adam at the Costa Book Awards in his 'rented suit', Photograph Luke MacGregor, Reuters
Did you see the interview with him on Dulwich OnView? Click here
Part of the report by Charlotte Higgins from the Guardian on Wednesday 28th is below.
‘When Sebastian Barry was narrowly pipped to the post for the Man Booker in October, he made no secret of his disappointment.
But now, finally, his novel The Secret Scripture has its prize, in the form of the £25,000 Costa book of the year award — but only by the very skin of its teeth.
In what the chair of the judges, Matthew Parris called “an extraordinarily close finish”, the 53 year old Irish novelist gained the support of five out of the nine judges — with the others supportive of Adam Foulds’s narrative poem The Broken Word, set during the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya.
Indeed, almost all the judges agreed Barry’s novel had “a lot wrong with it”, according to Parris. “They agreed that it was flawed, and almost no one liked the ending, which was almost fatal to its success.”
But by the end of an hour and a quarter of deliberations, “seven or eight” of the judges professed themselves happy for Barry to win, according to Parris. It is almost unheard of for a literary judging panel to acknowledge a split of this kind.
Of the head-to-head between The Broken Word and The Secret Scripture, Parris said: “It’s a no-brainer. Buy them both.”
Barry said he had read Foulds’s work: “It is an incredible poem. If the poetry is of this standard, I thought ‘I am in real trouble’.”
A cheap way to buy them online is from Untitled Books.
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