News & Reviews

WORD: Ali Smith takes Whitbread Award for ‘The Accidental’

Ali Smith won the 2005 Whitbread Book Award for her first full-length novel The Accidental, a "remarkable novel (that) is at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark." For wining Best Novel she was awarded 5,000 pounds and a shot at Whitbread’s Book of the Year.

The Whitbread Book Award, which goes to authors whose books were first published in the UK or Ireland, has become one of Britain’s most prestigious awards. The Accidental, published by Hamish Hamilton, beat out Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down (Viking), Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (Jonathan Cape) and Christopher Wilson’s The Ballad of Lee Cotton (Little, Brown).

The Accidental is about a 12-year-old girl spending the summer in a holiday home with her family who starts filming the dawn breaking each morning on a digital camera. Judges said it’s essentially a modern-day reworking of Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem.

Other category winners

Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory won the First Novel Award; Hilary Spurling won the Biography Award with the second part of her biography of Matisse, Matisse the Master; Christopher Logue won Best Poetry with the fifth installment of his celebrated account of the Iliad, Cold Calls; and Kate Thompson took the Children's Book Award with The New Policeman.

The five Whitbread Book Award winners each received 5,000 pounds and were selected from 476 entries, the highest total ever received in one year. The five books are now eligible for the ultimate prize, the 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year.

Whitbread will announce a winner at The Brewery in central London on Tuesday, January 24.

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