Ali Smith Wins the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award For The Accidental

Posted on January 5, 2006

The BBC reports that author Ali Smith has won the Whitbread Novel of the Year award with her novel The Accidental, beating out Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby.

Tash Aw picked up the first novel award for The Harmony Silk Factory, beating Rachel Zadok amongst others. All the category winners receive �5,000 and compete for the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year title, which carries an additional �25,000 prize.
Honouring books from last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland, the latest Whitbread awards attracted a record 476 entries. A panel of judges - including writer Margaret Drabble, ITN journalist Alastair Stewart, actresses Joanna David and her daughter Emilia Fox - will decide the overall winner on 24 January.
Ali Smith's novel The Accidental follows a girl spending summer with a family in Norfolk. The Whitbread judges said: "From the outset, The Accidental stood out as a glorious work of fiction that inspired both laughter and sadness and that none of us could stop reading." Having been unsuccessfully nominated for last year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction, The Accidental beat Whitbread contenders Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown and Christopher Wilson's The Ballad of Lee Cotton.
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Matisse The Master by Hilary Spurling won the biography award and Cold Calls by Christopher Logue took the poetry title. Kate Thompson beat three-time Whitbread winner Geraldine McCaughrean to take the children's book award for The New Policeman.

Of course, it's a bit sad because the sponsor Whitbread has now pulled out of the awards, saying that the book contest really has nothing to do with its hotel and restaurant business and they don't sell products using the Whitbread name any longer. So far, no new sponsor has been found.