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News & Reviews
WORD:
Ali Smith takes Whitbread Award for ‘The Accidental’
Ali Smith won the 2005
Whitbread Book Award for her first full-length novel The Accidental, a "remarkable novel
(that) is at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark." For wining
Best Novel she was awarded 5,000 pounds and a shot at Whitbread’s Book
of the Year.
The Whitbread Book Award, which goes to authors whose books were first
published in the UK or Ireland, has become one of Britain’s most
prestigious awards. The Accidental, published by Hamish Hamilton, beat
out Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down
(Viking), Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar
the Clown (Jonathan Cape) and Christopher
Wilson’s The Ballad of Lee Cotton (Little, Brown).
The Accidental is about a 12-year-old girl spending the summer in a
holiday home with her family who starts filming the dawn breaking each
morning on a digital camera. Judges said it’s essentially a modern-day
reworking of Pasolini’s 1968
film Theorem.
Other category winners
Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk
Factory won the First Novel Award; Hilary Spurling won the Biography
Award with the second part of her biography of Matisse, Matisse the Master; Christopher Logue won Best Poetry
with the fifth installment of his celebrated account of the Iliad, Cold Calls; and Kate Thompson took the Children's
Book Award with The New Policeman.
The five Whitbread Book Award winners each received 5,000 pounds and
were selected from 476 entries, the highest total ever received in one
year. The five books are now eligible for the ultimate prize, the 2005
Whitbread Book of the Year.
Whitbread will announce a winner at The Brewery in central London on
Tuesday, January 24.
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