The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey (Peepal Tree) has won the £30,000 2020 Costa Book of the Year award.
The Costa Book Awards recognize “some of the most enjoyable books of the year, written by authors based in the UK and Ireland.” Each winner in the five individual categories receives £5,000. The Costa Book of the Year was selected from the category winners and announced in an online ceremony on January 26, 2021. This year’s final judges were Angellica Bell, Horatio Clare, Jill Dawson, Sadie Jones, Zaffar Kunial, Patrice Lawrence, Suzannah Lipscomb (chair), Stephen Mangan, and Simon Savidge.
For more information, including the complete list of winners, see the Costa website.
Last modified on Thu 28 Jan 2021 06.48 EST
Monique Roffey has won the £30,000 Costa book of the year award for her sixth novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch, which opens as a fisherman on a Caribbean island sees a “barnacled, seaweed-clotted” mermaid raise her head from the sea.
Suzannah Lipscomb, the historian and broadcaster who chaired the judges, said the novel was “utterly original – unlike anything we’ve ever read – and feels like a classic in the making from a writer at the height of her powers”. Based on a legend from the Taino, an indigenous people of the Caribbean,
the novel is a dark love story about fisherman David and Aycayia, a beautiful woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid, who has swum the Caribbean for centuries.
Memoir, biography, essays and more. By Aoife Barry Saturday 9 Jan 2021, 7:00 AM Jan 9th 2021, 7:00 AM 12,406 Views 0 Comments
Image: Shutterstock/patpitchaya
Image: Shutterstock/patpitchaya
YES, THERE ARE still more books to look out for this year. We already told you what Irish books to watch out for, and what international fiction to keep track of.
Here’s our list of mostly international non-fiction for those who prefer things out of the fictional realm.
Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley Ford
Ford, a features writer, has a huge amount of fans in the US – but many here too in Ireland. This book, about the imprisonment of her father and its effect on her life, is sure to be a fascinating read.
Just before dawn a moon like a burning orange balloon appears, its reflection gilding our pilgrim path across the sands to Holy Island, Northumbria.
I cry out in delight and start describing this luminous beauty into my microphone we have been tasked with finding hope and wonder in the depths of the darkest year, and in this wild and sacred place, in a mingling of moonlight, land and sea, here they are.
BBC Radio 3’s Sound Walks are now a Christmas tradition. While engineer Andy Fell records the soundscape, I report the sights, smells and stories we encounter, performing a kind of live travel writing, my other job.
Travel writer reflects on how winter affects our psyches
Play Segment31:28
Many Canadians are facing down winter during the pandemic with dread. And that s something that Horatio Clare can relate to. The British travel writer has seasonal affective disorder and delved into how the season affects our psyches for his memoir The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal. He speaks with Piya Chattopadhyay about how we should be rethinking the season, what other cultures can teach us, and his hopes for how we can all get through this particular winter together. Plus, we hear a poignant rumination on the season from Edmonton s poet laureate Nisha Patel.