Costa Book Awards 1985: Complete list of winners

The 1985 Costa Book Awards (then known as the Whitbread Book Awards, before the coffee company’s sponsorship began) delivered a year of remarkable debuts and established masterworks that would go on to shape British literary culture. Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, a densely imagined historical novel about the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, took the top Novel prize, while Jeanette Winterson made an extraordinary splash with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a debut so assured and innovative it immediately announced a major new voice in fiction. The recognition of Winterson’s first novel alongside such seasoned talents speaks to how exceptional her arrival felt to the literary world that year.

Beyond the fiction categories, the awards painted a vivid picture of British letters in the mid-1980s. Douglas Dunn’s Elegies, a collection of poems written after the death of his wife, brought profound emotional weight to the Poetry category, while Ben Pimlott’s biography of Hugh Dalton demonstrated the continued prestige of substantial biographical work. Janni Howker’s The Nature of the Beast, winner of the Children’s Book award, showed that young readers were being served with serious, unflinching stories that treated adolescent experiences with genuine complexity.

Here are the complete 1985 Costa Book Awards winners across all categories:

Biography

• Hugh Dalton by Ben Pimlott

Children’s Book

• The Nature of the Beast by Janni Howker

First Novel

• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Novel

• Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd

Poetry

• Elegies by Douglas Dunn