Irish writer becomes youngest ever winner of Costa Novel Award

Irish novelist Sally Rooney has won the 2018 Costa Novel Award for her second book "Normal People."

The 27-year-old has become the youngest-ever recipient of this, the most prestigious award for a novel open only to British and Irish authors.

She is now in the running for the overall prize of 2018 Costa Book of the Year, competing with the winners of four other categories recognized by the awards: first novel, biography, poetry and children’s book.

The winner will be announced on January 29. 

Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, The White Review, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Kevin Barry’s Stonecutter and The Winter Page anthology.

Rooney’s debut novel, “Conversations with Friends,” was a Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard Book of the Year. The novel was longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize, and shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award, the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year 2017, and the Rathbones Folio Prize.

Read more: Man Booker Prize goes to Irish novel about The Troubles “Milkman”

Rooney was also the winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017 and her second novel "Normal People," if anything, outdid the success of her first. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which was eventually won by Belfast author Anna Burns for "Milkman," and won Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards in November 2018. 

Have you read "Normal People?" Let us know what you thought of it in the comments section, below. 

Rooney's first novel "Conversations with Friends" was chosen as a Book of the Month in IrishCentral's Book Club. You can find more picks of the month by joining the club here.