Costa Book Awards 1995: Complete list of winners

The 1995 Costa Book Awards showcased the remarkable range of British and Commonwealth literature at its finest, celebrating everything from sweeping historical biography to children’s adventure. Roy Jenkins’s monumental Gladstone claimed the biography prize, while Salman Rushdie’s magisterial The Moor’s Last Sigh took the novel award—a particularly resonant win given the intensity of his career in the early nineties. The year also belonged to debut talents: Kate Atkinson’s inventive Behind the Scenes at the Museum announced a major new voice in the first novel category, demonstrating that the Costa Book Awards (formerly known as the Whitbread Book Awards) had an eye for emerging brilliance alongside established masters.

What made 1995 especially compelling was the quality across all five categories. Michael Morpurgo delivered accessible storytelling with The Wreck of the Zanzibar, reminding the Costa judges that children’s literature deserves the same rigorous recognition as adult fiction. Bernard O’Donoghue’s Gunpowder brought poetic sophistication to the poetry prize, rounding out a year that felt genuinely representative of what British publishers were producing at the time. These awards remain a reliable indicator of which books would endure—a track record the Costa Book Awards has maintained throughout its decades of recognizing literary achievement.

Here are the complete 1995 Costa Book Awards winners:

Biography

• Gladstone by Roy Jenkins

Children’s Book

• The Wreck of the Zanzibar by Michael Morpurgo

First Novel

• Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

Novel

• The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

Poetry

• Gunpowder by Bernard O’Donoghue