So there was little cause for surprise that such titles were prominent again in the Costa shortlists for 2016, announced this week. Only Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be the Place is contemporary, although it visits earlier decades in backstory scenes. Rather pleasingly, that leaves fuddy-duddy poetry, the remaining category (an all-female shortlist: Melissa Lee-Houghton, Alice Oswald, Denise Riley and Kate Tempest) as the only one full of non-historical books. While the Costas’ tilt to the past seems unusually pronounced, it’s a trend seen in other prizes, too. The US National Book award has just been won by Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which unfolds in the antebellum south, while the reigning Pulitzer fiction winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, centres on the Vietnam war.

Source: The Guardian November 26, 2016 15:00 UTC