Booker winner andpoet vie for UK’s Costa prize

LONDON - Reuters

Julian Barnes. REUTERS photo

Julian Barnes, who won this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s poet laureate, were among the nominees for the 2011 Costa Book Awards announced Tuesday.

English author Barnes is one of four shortlisted for the best novel category for “The Sense of an Ending,” the work that won him the coveted Booker award last month at the fourth time of asking.

Scottish writer Duffy, who was made the nation’s poet in 2009, has been shortlisted in the poetry section for “The Bees.”

The winner of each of the five categories -- novel, first novel, biography, poetry and children’s book -- will be revealed on January 4, 2012 and the overall Costa Book of the Year winner on January 24.

Barnes is up against John Burnside for “A Summer of Drowning,” Andrew Miller for “Pure” and Louisa Young for “My Dear I Wanted to Tell You” in the novel category.

Duffy takes on poets David Harsent for “Night,” Jackie Kay for “Fiere” and Sean O’Brien for “November.”

The 2010 Costa Book of the Year also went to a work of poetry -- “Of Mutability” by Jo Shapcott.

Since 1985 the award, open to books first published in the United Kingdom or Ireland, has been won nine times by a novel, four times by a debut novel, five times by a biography, seven times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book.

In the biography section, journalist Patrick Cockburn and his son Henry co-authored an account of the latter’s struggles with paranoid schizophrenia in “Henry’s Demons: Living with Schizophrenia - A Father and Son’s Story.”

Also in the category is Claire Tomalin’s account of Charles Dickens, who is expected to be the subject of a raft of books in the run-up to the bicentenary of his birth next February