Costa Award Successes for LU Alumni

Lancaster alumni have won Costa Book of the Year Awards two years in succession.

Andrew Miller, PhD English and Creative Writing, 1997, won the 2011 Costa Book of the Year Award for his novel 'Pure' and was presented with the overall prize and a cheque for £30,000 at a ceremony in London. Set in pre-revolutionary Paris in 1785, 'Pure' is the story of Jean-Baptiste Baratte, an ambitious young engineer, who is assigned the task of emptying the noxious, overflowing Parisian cemetery Les Innocents, and of demolishing its church.

Mary Talbot, PhD Linguistics and English Language, 1991, whose graphic work was judged to be the winner of the biography section in the 2012 Costa book awards – a first for the prestigious literary prize that also reached another significant milestone when women swept the board in the five categories. The book entitled 'Dotter of Her Father's Eyes' was illustrated by her husband Bryan, a veteran of the comic genre. She and her husband won the £5,000 biography prize for a book that interweaves the true and tragic story of James Joyce's daughter Lucia with the author's own troubled relationship with her father, the eminent Joycean scholar James S Atherton.

Visit the events page to read about the Creative Writing Department's anniversary reunion in May 2013