The Costa Book Awards, one among the most prestigious awards in UK, announced its category award winners on 6 January 2009. The award, which is considered by many as a more populist literary prize than the Booker, merits the greatest works from UK and is also open to writers from the Republic of Ireland. The awards selected one winner in each of these five categories as per their customary procedure: Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book, and each winning author received a whopping sum of £5,000! Culturazzi take a look at who the judges chose as winners and why:

Year 2008 was surely an eventful one for the literary world. Salman Rushdie won the Best of the Booker award early this year and Aravind Adiga bagged the Booker Prize for his debut The White Tiger. American author Stephanie Meyer stole J.K Rowling’s coveted place to become the queen of teenage fantasy. Great authors emerged and grand writers were lost. We shall miss the inspirations of Randy Paush and the techno thriller novels of Michael Crichton after they died this year, but we have a roll of other great novels to relish! Let’s take a look…