Kicking off the book prizes in 2017 are Costa Book Awards which just announced the winners in each of its five categories. Find out more here.

Winner Costa Novel Award – Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End  follows two friends who flee hardship in their Ireland and sign up to fight the Indian wars in America and subsequently the American Civil War. Sounds like something for fans of The Son by Phillip Meyer or Neverhome by Laird Hunt, amongst whom I count myself.

Winner Costa First Novel Award – Golden Hill by Thomas Spufford is set in the mid-1700s and portrays early day life on Manhattan and a young English immigrant ready to reinvent himself.

Winner Costa Biography Award – Dadland: A Journey into Uncharted Territory by Keggie Carew is the life story of the author’s colourful, daredevil father Tom Carew, a member of parachute units in France and Burma during the Second World War, a treasure hunter, a charmer and, finally, a dementia sufferer.

Winner Costa Poetry Award – Falling Awake by Alice Oswald poetry deals with death and ‘life’s loosing struggle with the gravity of nature’.

Winner Costa Children’s Book Award – The Bombs That Brought Us Together by Brian Conaghan. A timely children’s book dealing with issues of war, occupation, totalitarianism and the importance of friendships across borders.

The overall winner, Costa Book of the Year, will be announced on the 31st January.

More on the Costa Prize Winners