Brian Conaghan wins Costa children's award

Costa has announced the winners of the Costa Book Awards 2016 in the First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book categories, with Brian Conaghan taking the children's award for his YA novel, The Bombs That Brought Us Together.

Last year the children's winning author Frances Hardinge went on to take the overall prize, with her novel The Lie Tree winning the 2015 Costa Book of the Year. The five winning authors who will now compete for the 2016 Costa Book of the Year are: - YA writer, Brian Conaghan - who originally received 217 rejections before finding a publisher and an agent - won the Costa Children's Book Award with his third novel, The Bombs That Brought Us Together, the story of two friends, one shed, a war and a terrible choice. - Francis Spufford, known for his prize-winning non-fiction, collected the Costa First Novel Award with his first work of fiction, Golden Hill, an historical novel set in New York in the winter of 1746. - Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry won the Costa Novel Award for the second time for his seventh novel, Days Without End, set in the wars (Indian and Civil) of 1850s America. Barry won the Costa Book of the Year in 2008 with his fourth novel, the bestselling The Secret Scripture. - Debut non-fiction writer, Keggie Carew, took the Costa Biography Award for Dadland. Part-detective story, part-memoir, part-history, it tells of her race against time as her father, Tom Carew, slips into dementia to uncover the truth about his life as a member of an elite Special Operations Executive unit, the Jedburghs, in the Second World War. the Times of India called him 'Lawrence of Burma', he collaborated with General Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi, and was awarded France's highest military honour, the Croix de Guerre. - Multi-award-winning Devon-based poet Alice Oswald has added the Costa Poetry Award to her repertoire for Falling Awake, a collection of poems which explore life's losing struggle with the gravity of nature which were written to be read aloud. The five Costa Book Award winners, each of whom will receive 5,000, were selected from 596 entries, and are now eligible for the 2016 Costa Book of the Year. The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 31st January 2017. Since the introduction of the Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won eleven times by a novel, five times by a first novel, six times by a biography, seven times by a collection of poetry and twice by a children's book.