Costa book awards: a depressing celebration of woke

By Robert J Davies

What is the point of the Costa book awards if the desire to champion woke, left-wing causes outweighs literary merit?

Of the five just-announced winners, four are women; three are black, one is Irish and one is French. Four of the five books deal with issues like feminism, homosexuality and racism. There is not a single white British person among them.

The overall winner is Trinidadian-born writer Monique Roffey who actually described her success as a “vote for Caribbean literature”. She takes home the top prize of £30,000.

But it shouldn’t be a vote for Caribbean literature! It’s supposed to be a vote for the best British literature, written by the finest British literary talent, and possibly, God forbid, reflecting British culture and way of life in a way that readers can relate to featuring characters not dissimilar to them.

From the reviews, one can quickly surmise that this fantasy story of a mermaid being pulled from the sea by fishermen is far more than a mere fairy tale. The mermaid herself is of colour, as you might expect, and is discovered by a bunch of ugly, coarse, “white” American men, whose skin pigment is continually referenced.

The writing? Because this book is woke and set in the West Indies, the normal rules, including those of grammar, seemingly don’t apply: “the mermaid scare [sic] me like hell when I first see [sic] her. Her top half pop up [sic]  from the sea. She was red, like an Amerindian woman, and all scaly and glittery too, like she polish sheself [sic] up good [sic]. Up she came from nowhere, man. I heard a splash and then woosh.”

Continuing the Trinidadian theme, the First Novel Award goes to Ingrid Persaud with Love After Love. She’s another Trinidadian-born writer who “divides her time between London and Barbados” – this too is written in Trinidadian dialect, with expressions like “buh whey nah” which apparently means “wait a minute”.

One of the principal characters is gay, naturally, and is struggling to keep his sexuality a secret, although these days, it’s probably well worth shouting it from the rooftops in terms of its potential for career promotion or the winning of book prizes.

The poetry award went to the late Irish feminist writer Eavan Boland for her work The Historians. At the time of writing, this book has so far acquired only one review on Amazon – four stars out of five: a single sentence remarking: “these are poems with a hard core, full of women and shadows and shadows of women. It reminded me of a century of trickling water wearing away stone.” Sounds riveting.

The Biography Award was won by a black Londoner called Lee Lawrence, billed as a story of “racism, riots and redemption”, currently coming in at no.10 on Amazon’s Discrimination & Racism bestseller list. This obviously taps in well to the current fashion for BLM worship – a story of Mr Lawrence’s fight for justice for his mother, paralysed as a result of a police shooting in her own home, prior to the 1985 Brixton riots.

Only one of the five books doesn’t appear to be inspired by wokeness and seems to have been selected for its genuine literary appeal: children’s book award winner Voyage of the Sparrowhawk by Natasha Farrant. She, however, isn’t terribly British. She describes herself as three-quarters French, an eighth English and an eighth Dutch. Yet this novel genuinely appears to be quality in the old-fashioned sense of being well-written and engaging.

One reviewer described it as a “book that makes you fall in love with reading.” Good. That’s the spirit. Isn’t that what books should be about? And shouldn’t that be the main criterion for choosing prize winners? There is simply no point in having prizes for literature if the main goal is to champion diversity rather than literary excellence. Nothing is more likely to put people off reading - or indeed writing - than that.

Unfortunately, in a society where freedom of thought and speech is increasingly under threat, this is just the latest depressing example of what happens when everything must be judged through a prism of political correctness and unfounded accusations of white, male oppression.