Andrew Miller has been awarded the Costa Book Awards 2011, Book of the Year for his novel Pure. Selected from the finalists in five categories – First Novel award, Novel award, Biography award, Poetry award and Children’s Book award – Andrew Miller received the prize of £30,000. This is his sixth novel, and is set in Paris in 1785 just before the French Revolution, with the narrative built around a young engineer, ordered to demolish Paris’s oldest cemetery (Saints Innocents Cemetery) and all that this entails, such as exhumation of the bodies buried there. (For background on the story, read this Guardian article, and this Wikipedia article about Paris’s Catacombs for some extra historical detail.)
Tiny sunbirds, far away by Christie Watson was awarded the Costa First Novel Award.