Costa Book Award for First Novel

I won my prizes for my first novel, which sounds very young and apprentice-y, but I was 50 when I dared to write my first novel.

I'd been a non-fiction writer before that, and my book, Golden Hill, won the Costa First Novel Award, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and something else which is embarrassing me, I can't now remember, but it was a kind of miraculous summer which settled... once and for all in my head my own doubts about whether switching to novels had been a good idea apparently it was a good idea you

know what that's almost an ego that's an emmy a tony an oscar a bafta all in one summer how brilliant

it was it was an amazing summer it became slightly embarrassing towards the end not that i refused any of them