Costa Book Awards

I’m so delighted and amazed that Unsettled Ground has won the Costa Novel Award 2021. It means a huge amount that Jeanie’s and Julius’s story will be more widely read, and it’s simply a wonderful privilege for the book to be chosen from so many entered and of course the brilliant shortlist. More information about the awards can be found here.

Unsettled Ground is about fifty-one year old twins, Jeanie and Julius who still live with their mother, Dot in rural isolation and poverty in the English countryside. When Dot dies, these adult children have navigate the real world for the first time. The novel has lots of themes: what home is, how the countryside is not always what it seems, how we all need friends, homelessness, and family lies. It makes a great book club book, and if you’d like to choose it for your book club, you can request book club questions here, to help get the discussion started.

I’m thrilled to let you know that my fourth novel, Unsettled Ground has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards. This prestigious annual prize, which is fifty years old this year, awards prizes for books written by UK and Irish authors, in five categories: Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book. One of the winners from these categories is selected as the overall Costa Book of the Year.

Unsettled Ground is one of four books in the Novel category, the winner of which will be announced on 4th January 2022. The five category winners will then be considered for the £30,000 prize announced in early February. You can read more about the prizes here, as well as seeing which other books are included in the novel category.

With this and the shortlisting earlier in 2021 for the Women’s Prize for Fiction it’s been quite a year! Keep your fingers crossed for me.

And if you’re in the UK and you’d like to buy a signed and dedicated copy of the hardback of Unsettled Ground, or any of my other books, click here.