Articles: A Beginner's Guide to Book Prizes

How much do you actually know about Book Awards?

With the longlist for the Man Booker Prize being recently announced I started to think about how much I actually knew about the prizes and awards on offer in publishing. When I realised how little this was, I wanted to learn more.

The only prizes I really knew were the now-discontinued Smarties Prize, and the recently-renamed Costa Awards (formerly the Whitebread Awards). I knew about the Smarties Prize because it was on my first Harry Potter book and I knew about the Costa Awards because I have recently read The Other Hand by Chris Cleave (a 2008 nominee) and read The Outcast by Sadie Jones (the 2008 First Novel Award winner) a while ago. I knew there were other awards and prizes – don