Costa Book Awards 2013: Shortlist in full

Bernadine Bishop leads posthumously with 'Unexpected Lessons in Love'

Bernardine Bishop

Bernadine Bishop, the youngest witness for D.H Lawrence in the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, is leading the Costa Awards nominations posthumously for Unexpected Lessons in Love.

Described by judges as an "unflinching, darkly funny story of love, obsession and illness that is unexpected in every way", Bishop's novel was published just six months before her death at the age of 73.

Should she not take home the best novel prize, another woman will, as all the shortlisted books are authored by females.

2013 Costa Novel Award shortlist

Kate Atkinson for Life After Life (Doubleday)

Bernardine Bishop for Unexpected Lessons in Love (John Murray)

Maggie O’Farrell for Instructions for a Heatwave (Tinder Press)

Evie Wyld for All the Birds, Singing (Jonathan Cape)

2013 Costa First Novel Award shortlist

Sam Byers for Idiopathy (Fourth Estate)

Kate Clanchy for Meeting the English (Picador)

Nathan Filer for The Shock of the Fall (HarperCollinsPublishers)

Sathnam Sanghera for Marriage Material (William Heinemann)

2013 Costa Biography Award shortlist

Gavin Francis for Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins (Chatto & Windus)

Thomas Harding for Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz (William Heinemann)

Lucy Hughes-Hallett for The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War (Fourth Estate)

Olivia Laing for The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink (Canongate)

2013 Costa Poetry Award shortlist

Clive James for Dante, The Divine Comedy (Picador)

Helen Mort for Division Street (Chatto & Windus)

Robin Robertson for Hill of Doors (Picador)

Michael Symmons Roberts for Drysalter (Jonathan Cape)

2013 Costa Children’s Book Award shortlist

Ross Montgomery for Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door (Faber and Faber)

Sarah Naughton for The Hanged Man Rises (Simon and Schuster)

Chris Riddell for Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse (Macmillan Children’s Books)

Elizabeth Wein for Rose Under Fire (Electric Monkey)