Summary
IF BOTH the bookmakers and most of literary Britain are right, just after 10 o'clock tonight, novelist AL Kennedy will be declared the overall winner of this year's Costa Book Awards. To most authors, the cheers from publishers, the smiling faces of the judges and awards presenter Mariella Frostrup, the GBP 25,000 cheque, and the applause from the 500 guests in the Ballroom at London's Intercontinental Hotel - would be the stuff of dreams.
But Alison Louise Kennedy isn't most authors. To say this Dundee- born writer has an ambiguous relationship with fame is as much of an understatement as saying that four year-old girls don't, as a rule, bounce eagerly into the dentist's chair and invite the attentions of syringe and drill.See the full content of this document
Extract
Night Into Day
That said, she's bought a new suit to wear tonight because, even if she doesn't win the main prize, she will pick up a GBP 5,000 cheque for her novel Day, a singularly intense and brilliantly realised story of a Second World War tailgunner on a Lancaster bomber, which has been chosen above 150 others as Costa Novel of the Year.
And she knows too exactly what winning the main Costa (formerly the Whitbread) Bo...See the full content of this document
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