After 50 years, the prize has been scrapped. How did it change Britain’s literary landscape? And what happened at the awards when Margaret Drabble was seated next to Theresa May?
argaret Drabble was a bright young star with five novels to her name in 1971, when she was talked into joining her old friend JB Priestley on the judging panel for a new book prize. “Jack told me that I should spend the fee by choosing some very nice half-bottles to drink by myself, which I did,” she recalls.
, was that they didn’t buy into that sort of literary snobbery. For 50 years, they spread a wide and egalitarian net across different genres, supporting bookshops as well as writers and publishers . Drabble doesn’t remember much about that first awards ceremony, except that Hill was “quite grumpy”. The following year, poetry was dropped as a category, in favour of children’s fiction.
“Winning the Costa book of the year has meant that collections which might normally have only sold hundreds of copies have gone on to sell tens of thousands, so that’s been wonderful in widening readership in the UK to people who might never have thought that poetry written in these times had anything to offer them,” says Neil Astley, editor of Bloodaxe Books, which published both Lowe and Helen Dunmore’s posthumous 2017 winner,But it’s a sad economic reality that poetry’s gain was usually the...