Prize hope for writer who found her forte at forty
A SCOTTISH author who wrote her debut novel at 40 has been tipped to win a major book award.
Gail Honeyman, now 46, is one of five authors vying for the Costa Book Award after winning the Costa First Novel category.
She wrote the bestselling Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine while working full-time in administration for a Scottish university.
The book, which tells the story of a survivor of childhood trauma, has been snapped up by Hollywood in anticipation of a major blockbuster film.
Actress Reese Witherspoon’s production company bought the rights to the story in May after the book enjoyed 20 weeks on the bestseller list.
To write the novel, Miss Honeyman rose at 5.30am each day to fit in a few hours of writing before work, as well as squeezing in another hour at lunchtime.
At the time, she was working in an administrative role at the University of Glasgow.
She revealed it was her landmark birthday that prompted her to start writing, saying: ‘I was hurtling towards 40 and I’d always wanted to write.
‘It does focus your mind, heading towards that big birthday. If there is anything you think you want to do, you think, “I should probably have a go now”. A big birthday like that focusses your mind. You think, “Either I give this a go or I put it in the bin”.’
The book was the focus of an eight-way auction at the Frankfurt Book Fair and has since gone on to sell in more than 30 territories worldwide.
Now Miss Honeyman finds herself competing with four other authors for the overall Costa Book Award later this month.
The Costa Poetry Award was won by the late Helen Dunmore for the last collection she wrote before her death from cancer last year at the age of 64.
Inside The Wave explores the borderline between the living and the dead. Judges called the collection, Miss Dunmore’s tenth, ‘an astonishing set of poems’ and ‘a final, great achievement’.
Rebecca Stott won best biography for In The Days Of Rain, a memoir about life inside the Exclusive Brethren, a Christian fundamentalist separatist cult.
Jon McGregor took the Costa Novel Award for Reservoir 13, a ‘hypnotic, compelling and original’ story of lives haunted by one family’s loss. He is the only man on the five-strong winners’ list.
Katherine Rundell wins the Children’s Book Award for her fourth book, The Explorer, an adventure story of four children fighting for survival in the Amazon rainforest.
According to Ladbrookes, Miss Honeymoon is favourite to win the overall prize with odds of 3/1, followed by Mr McGregor at 4/1.
The overall winner, chosen by a panel of judges, will be announced on January 30 in London. Translation rights to Miss Honeyman’s book have been sold around the world and it was named one of The Observer newspaper’s Debuts of the Year for 2017.
Miss Honeyman was also awarded the Scottish Book Trust’s Next Chapter Award in 2014, and has been longlisted for BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines story competition.
The Glasgow-based author has said previously: ‘I thought it was a very specifically Glaswegian story and certainly Scottish story, so when it sold in Korea and Japan... I suppose the city setting does translate to other countries.’
The Costa Book Awards are open solely to authors living in the UK and Ireland, for titles published in the past year.
‘I’d always wanted to write’