Literary Prize · United Kingdom and Ireland · 1971 to 2005
Whitbread Novel Award
In January 2000 the judges of the Whitbread Book of the Year had two books in front of them: Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Heaney won by one vote, five to four. The brewery that gave its name to these awards started them in 1971, and the novel was one of the first three categories. Its winners run from Iris Murdoch and Beryl Bainbridge to Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Haddon and Andrea Levy; William Trevor won it three times. In 2006 the awards became the Costa Book Awards, and in 2022 Costa ended them. This page lists every Whitbread Novel Award winner, the Costa winners that carried the category on, and ten winners still worth reading.
By Lisanne Swart · 35 Whitbread winners and 16 Costa winners · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below. The year on each spine is the year it won.
Quick answer
The Whitbread Novel Award went to one novel a year from 1971 to 2005: 35 winners, from Gerda Charles’s The Destiny Waltz to Ali Smith’s The Accidental. Seven of them also won the overall Whitbread Book of the Year. In 2006 the prize was renamed the Costa Novel Award, which ran for another 16 years until Costa stopped the awards in 2022. Below: every winner of both, year by year, and the 10 winners I would start with.
How This Page Chooses
The Whitbread Novel Award had one winner a year, so the list itself is not a choice: every winner from 1971 to 2005 is in the table further down, followed by the Costa Novel Award winners from 2006 to 2021.
The ten books on the shelf are my selection from the Whitbread years: winners that are still in print and still widely read, from 1985, the year the overall Book of the Year began, to 2004. The year given for each book is the award year, which is also the year the book came out; the winners were announced the following January.
The Last Whitbread Novel Award: The Accidental (2005)
The final Whitbread Novel Award went to Ali Smith in January 2006. Later that year Costa took over the awards, and the category carried on as the Costa Novel Award.
Novel · Winner 2005The Accidental
Ali Smith · 2005
The Smart family is spending the summer in a rented house in Norfolk when a stranger called Amber turns up at the door. Each of them assumes someone else invited her, and she stays, and changes all four of them. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Ali Smith won the Costa Novel Award again in 2014 with How to Be Both.
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10 Whitbread Novel Award Winners Still Worth Reading
In the order they won, from 1985 to 2004. Where a book also won the overall Book of the Year, or another prize, it says so after the year.
Hawksmoor
Two Londons, two and a half centuries apart. In the early 1700s the architect Nicholas Dyer builds churches across the City and the East End and, in secret, performs occult rites in them. In the 1980s a detective called Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates a series of murders at the same churches. Dyer’s chapters are written in the English of his own time.
Why read itA detective story and a historical novel in alternating chapters, and still the novel Ackroyd is best known for.
An Artist of the Floating World
Masuji Ono, an ageing painter in a Japanese city a few years after the Second World War, is trying to marry off his younger daughter. As he goes over his past for her future in-laws, it slowly becomes clear what the people around him hold against him: the work he did for the wartime imperial cause. It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Why read itAn early version of the narrator Ishiguro later used in The Remains of the Day: a man who tells you everything except the thing that matters.
The Satanic Verses
Two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, fall from a hijacked plane that explodes over the English Channel, and survive. Gibreel starts turning into the archangel Gabriel, Saladin into a goat-legged devil, and the novel follows them through London and through Gibreel’s dreams. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; within months of publication Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death.
Why read itRead it for the book itself: a comic, sprawling novel about migrants in London that is still buried under its controversy.
Felicia’s Journey
Felicia, eighteen and pregnant, leaves her small town in Ireland for the English Midlands to find the young man who left her, with no address for him. She is helped by Mr Hilditch, a polite, overweight catering manager who seems kind. Atom Egoyan filmed it in 1999.
Why read itTrevor is the only writer to win the Novel Award three times, and this is the one that also took Book of the Year.
The Moor’s Last Sigh
Moraes Zogoiby, called Moor, tells the story of his family, spice merchants in Cochin, over four generations, ending in the Bombay of the 1990s. He ages at twice the normal speed, so at thirty-six he has the body of a man of seventy-two. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Why read itRushdie’s second Novel Award, and the easier way in: one family, one city, four generations.
Every Man for Himself
Morgan, a young relative of the American banker J. P. Morgan, tells the four days of the Titanic’s maiden voyage, from Southampton to the sinking, among the rich passengers in first class. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Why read itBainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker five times and never won it; the Whitbread gave her the Novel Award twice.
Quarantine
A handful of people go into the Judean desert to fast for forty days, among them a young Galilean called Jesus. Nearby, a merchant called Musa, abandoned by his caravan with a fever, recovers and sets himself up as master of the fasters. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Why read itA novel about Jesus in which he barely speaks; the rest is hunger, heat and a very convincing con man.
Spies
An old man goes back to the suburban close where he grew up during the Second World War. As boys, he and his friend Keith became convinced that Keith’s mother was a German spy, and started following her.
Why read itA short novel about how a child misreads the adult world, told by an adult who is not sure he has read it right either.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Christopher Boone, fifteen, from Swindon, finds his neighbour’s dog killed with a garden fork and decides to investigate, writing it all down as a murder mystery. What he finds out is about his own family.
Why read itIt was published for adults and for children at the same time, and later became a long-running stage play.
Small Island
London, 1948. Hortense arrives from Jamaica to join her husband Gilbert, who served in the RAF during the war, and finds a single room in the house of Queenie Bligh, whose own husband Bernard has not come home from the war. The four of them take turns telling the story.
Why read itThe only book on this list that won the Novel Award, Book of the Year and the Orange Prize.
Every Whitbread Novel Award Winner, 1971 to 2005
35 novels in 35 years, one winner a year, grouped by decade. Open a decade to see its winners; titles link to the book. The last column shows which book won the overall Book of the Year, from 1985, when that prize began: “This book” means the novel won it.
The 1970s
1971 to 1979 · 9 winners
| Year | Novel | Author | Book of the Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1971 | The Destiny Waltz | Gerda Charles | |
| 1972 | The Bird of Night | Susan Hill | |
| 1973 | The Chip-Chip Gatherers | Shiva Naipaul | |
| 1974 | The Sacred and Profane Love Machine | Iris Murdoch | |
| 1975 | Docherty | William McIlvanney | |
| 1976 | The Children of Dynmouth | William Trevor | |
| 1977 | Injury Time | Beryl Bainbridge | |
| 1978 | Picture Palace | Paul Theroux | |
| 1979 | The Old Jest | Jennifer Johnston |
No overall Book of the Year yet: each category winner stood on its own.
The 1980s
1980 to 1989 · 10 winners
| Year | Novel | Author | Book of the Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1980 | How Far Can You Go? | David Lodge | |
| 1981 | Silver’s City | Maurice Leitch | |
| 1982 | Young Shoulders | John Wain | |
| 1983 | Fools of Fortune | William Trevor | |
| 1984 | Kruger’s Alp | Christopher Hope | |
| 1985 | Hawksmoor | Peter Ackroyd | Douglas Dunn, Elegies (poetry) |
| 1986 | An Artist of the Floating World | Kazuo Ishiguro | This book |
| 1987 | The Child in Time | Ian McEwan | Christopher Nolan, Under the Eye of the Clock (biography) |
| 1988 | The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie | Paul Sayer, The Comforts of Madness (first novel) |
| 1989 | The Chymical Wedding | Lindsay Clarke | Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (biography) |
The overall Book of the Year began in 1985. In 1989 the judges first chose Alexander Stuart’s The War Zone, then withdrew the award amid controversy and gave it to Lindsay Clarke.
The 1990s
1990 to 1999 · 10 winners
| Year | Novel | Author | Book of the Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Hopeful Monsters | Nicholas Mosley | This book |
| 1991 | The Queen of the Tambourine | Jane Gardam | John Richardson, A Life of Picasso (biography) |
| 1992 | Poor Things | Alasdair Gray | Jeff Torrington, Swing Hammer Swing! (first novel) |
| 1993 | Theory of War | Joan Brady | This book |
| 1994 | Felicia’s Journey | William Trevor | This book |
| 1995 | The Moor’s Last Sigh | Salman Rushdie | Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (first novel) |
| 1996 | Every Man for Himself | Beryl Bainbridge | Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (poetry) |
| 1997 | Quarantine | Jim Crace | Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (poetry) |
| 1998 | Leading the Cheers | Justin Cartwright | Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (poetry) |
| 1999 | Music and Silence | Rose Tremain | Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (poetry) |
In 1999 Heaney’s Beowulf beat Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to Book of the Year by five votes to four.
The 2000s
2000 to 2005 · 6 winners
| Year | Novel | Author | Book of the Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | English Passengers | Matthew Kneale | This book |
| 2001 | Twelve Bar Blues | Patrick Neate | Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (children’s) |
| 2002 | Spies | Michael Frayn | Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (biography) |
| 2003 | The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | Mark Haddon | This book |
| 2004 | Small Island | Andrea Levy | This book |
| 2005 | The Accidental | Ali Smith | Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master (biography) |
In 2001 Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass became the first children’s book to win Book of the Year.
The Costa Novel Award, 2006 to 2021
After the rename the novel category kept going under Costa’s name for 16 more years. Several writers from the Whitbread years came back to win it: Ali Smith again, William Boyd, who had won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1981, and Kate Atkinson, twice. For the whole Costa period, all five categories, see my page on the Costa Book Awards.
Costa Novel Award
2006 to 2021 · 16 winners
| Year | Novel | Author | Book of the Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | Restless | William Boyd | Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves (first novel) |
| 2007 | Day | A. L. Kennedy | This book |
| 2008 | The Secret Scripture | Sebastian Barry | This book |
| 2009 | Brooklyn | Colm Tóibín | Christopher Reid, A Scattering (poetry) |
| 2010 | The Hand That First Held Mine | Maggie O’Farrell | Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (poetry) |
| 2011 | Pure | Andrew Miller | This book |
| 2012 | Bring Up the Bodies | Hilary Mantel | This book |
| 2013 | Life After Life | Kate Atkinson | Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall (first novel) |
| 2014 | How to Be Both | Ali Smith | Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (biography) |
| 2015 | A God in Ruins | Kate Atkinson | Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree (children’s) |
| 2016 | Days Without End | Sebastian Barry | This book |
| 2017 | Reservoir 13 | Jon McGregor | Helen Dunmore, Inside the Wave (poetry) |
| 2018 | Normal People | Sally Rooney | Bart van Es, The Cut Out Girl (biography) |
| 2019 | Middle England | Jonathan Coe | Jack Fairweather, The Volunteer (biography) |
| 2020 | The Mermaid of Black Conch | Monique Roffey | This book |
| 2021 | Unsettled Ground | Claire Fuller | Hannah Lowe, The Kids (poetry) |
Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (2012) also won the Booker Prize.
From Whitbread to Costa, and the End of the Awards
Whitbread, then best known as a brewery, founded the awards in 1971 as the Whitbread Literary Awards, with three categories: novel, biography and poetry. A children’s category followed in 1972 and a first novel award in 1981; its first winner was William Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa. From 1985, as the Whitbread Book Awards, there were five fixed categories, and one of the five winners was chosen as Whitbread Book of the Year. That is what made the prize unusual: a novel could win its category and then lose the top award to a poetry collection, a biography or a children’s book. Costa’s own list of past winners also marks David Lodge’s 1980 novel as Book of the Year, before the overall prize formally began.
In December 2005 Whitbread announced it would stop sponsoring the awards, saying it was no longer a consumer-facing brand. On 1 June 2006 Costa Coffee, at the time still owned by Whitbread, took them over, and the prize became the Costa Book Awards. In its later years the category winners received £5,000 each and the Book of the Year £30,000; books had to be first published in the UK or Ireland, by authors living there.
On 10 June 2022 Costa announced that the awards would end, without giving a reason. The 2021 awards, presented in February 2022, were the fiftieth and the last; the final Novel Award went to Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground.
The Whitbread Novel Award in short
- Founded by
- Whitbread, the British brewing and later hotel and leisure company, in 1971
- Years
- 1971 to 2005 as the Whitbread; 2006 to 2021 as the Costa Novel Award
- Known for
- Being one of five category awards, whose winners then competed for a single Book of the Year
- Winners
- 35 under Whitbread, one novel a year, never shared
- Most wins
- William Trevor, three times: 1976, 1983 and 1994
- Also Book of the Year
- Seven Whitbread novel winners, from Ishiguro in 1986 to Andrea Levy in 2004
- Prize money
- £5,000 per category and £25,000 for Book of the Year at the last Whitbread awards
- Ended
- 10 June 2022, announced by Costa; the 2021 awards were the last
Frequently asked questions about the Whitbread Novel Award
What was the Whitbread Novel Award?
One of the categories of the Whitbread Book Awards, a British literary prize founded by the Whitbread company in 1971. It went to one novel a year by an author living in the UK or Ireland. From 1985 the novel winner also competed with the other category winners for the overall Whitbread Book of the Year.
Who won the last Whitbread Novel Award?
Ali Smith, for The Accidental, at the 2005 awards, announced in January 2006. Later in 2006 the prize was renamed the Costa Book Awards, and the category continued as the Costa Novel Award.
Is the Whitbread Prize the same as the Costa Book Award?
Yes. Whitbread withdrew its sponsorship at the end of 2005, and on 1 June 2006 Costa Coffee, then a Whitbread brand, took over the awards and renamed them the Costa Book Awards. The categories, including the novel award, stayed the same.
Does the Whitbread or Costa Book Award still exist?
No. Costa announced on 10 June 2022 that it was ending the awards, without giving a reason. The 2021 awards, presented in February 2022, were the fiftieth and last; the final Costa Novel Award went to Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground.
Who won the Whitbread Novel Award most often?
William Trevor, three times: for The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Fools of Fortune (1983) and Felicia’s Journey (1994). Beryl Bainbridge and Salman Rushdie each won it twice.
Which Whitbread Novel Award winners also won Book of the Year?
Seven: An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986), Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley (1990), Theory of War by Joan Brady (1993), Felicia’s Journey by William Trevor (1994), English Passengers by Matthew Kneale (2000), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003) and Small Island by Andrea Levy (2004).
Which Whitbread Novel Award winners should I read first?
Start with Small Island by Andrea Levy (2004), An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986) or Felicia’s Journey by William Trevor (1994). The ten winners on this page run from 1985 to 2004.
Footnotes
- Costa Book Awards: past winners, 1971–2021 (PDF) — Costa
- Costa Book Award for Novel — Wikipedia
- Costa Book Awards — Wikipedia
- Whitbread Novel Award winners — Christchurch City Libraries
- Costa Book Award — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Whitbread book prize no longer backed by retail group — Authorlink, December 2005
- New sponsor for Whitbread awards — Books+Publishing, June 2006
- Costa Book Awards ends after 50 years — The Bookseller, 2022
- Abrupt end to U.K.’s Costa Awards — Publishers Weekly, 2022
- Whitbread Book of the Year, 2006 — RTÉ News
- Beowulf beats Harry Potter — Christian Science Monitor, 2000
- Costa Book Awards 2016 shortlists announced — Costa press release
Every winner was checked against Costa’s own list of past winners and cross-checked with Wikipedia and Christchurch City Libraries. Years are award years, which match the year of publication; winners were announced the following January. Winners last verified 7 October 2026.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
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