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Tipped for £30,000 prize, the Outcast writer
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent6 Jan 2009
A LONDON writer who toiled for years without success is now being tipped for one of the biggest prizes in literature.
Waterstone's has named The Outcast by Sadie Jones, 41, the most likely victor when the £30,000 Costa Book of the Year is announced on 27 January. She was last night named the winner of the Costa First Novel Award.
The victory tops an astonishing year for the mother-of-two from Notting Hill after her debut novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and named a Richard and Judy Summer Read. Jones, who is married to architect Tim Boyd, said: "It's very gratifying. The book has had so much luck - just getting it published was enough in a way."
The Outcast, which was one of the year's biggest fiction sellers, is the story of Lewis, a young boy traumatised by the death of his mother who falls victim to post-war middle-class hypocrisy. It proved a massive breakthrough.
Jones had secured her first agent at 22 and wrote film and television scripts for years to no avail.
She is now adapting the novel for the big screen. "It's odd because [success] has been completely transforming professionally, but creatively it's all still part of the same thing. You still sit down and you do the work, but you have a replacement demon. It's not, 'will it be published?' It's 'is the second one going to be as good?'"
The other Costa winners are Sebastian Barry, 53, from County Wicklow, for best novel with The Secret Scripture; former publisher Diana Athill, 91, of north London, for her memoir Somewhere Towards The End; Adam Foulds for poetry with his narrative The Broken Word; and Michelle Magorian, 61, of Southsea, for her children's book Just Henry. Foulds, 34, from Forest Hill, said: "It's lovely to think that readers will be brought to the work by the profile of the prize."
His poem is about the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya. He added: "It struck me that this was a forgotten or, arguably, repressed part of British history."
Janine Cook, Waterstone's fiction buyer, praised the winners as "extraordinarily powerful" and added: "Our bet is that The Outcast will be the overall winner."
Category winners each receive £5,000 with the overall victor taking another £25,000.
