Caffè Nero is launching a new suite of writing awards, a year after fellow coffee shop chain Costa scrapped its popular book awards.
Like the Costa prizes, the not-for-profit Nero book awards will choose winners in various categories. These categories are mostly the same as the Costas were: children’s books, debut fiction, fiction and nonfiction. However, there will not be a poetry category in the prize’s inaugural year.
The Nero awards will be open to books by writers based in the UK and Ireland, and will be administered by trade organisation the Booksellers Association. The awards are also in partnership with Brunel University London and Right to Dream, a charity dedicated to “expanding people’s understanding of excellence through football”.
Each award will carry a prize of £5,000. The four category winners will then compete for an overall award, titled the Nero Gold prize, which is worth £30,000.
Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers Association, said the awards were “first and foremost for readers, but their impact will be felt widely – by authors, publishers, agents, book retailers, libraries and festivals – as they create discussion around nominated books and drive consumer engagement with bookshops and libraries”. The emphasis, she added, would be on “commercial books with wide appeal”.
Addressing the fact there was no poetry category, a spokesperson for the awards said: “These are a brand-new set of awards, developed in partnership with Caffè Nero and the Booksellers Association. The chosen categories reflect the main genres readers are most likely to find/see when they visit a bookshop or online retailer. As the awards become established over time, it’s possible additional categories could be added in the future.”
The awards will be judged by industry professionals, including booksellers, authors, media commentators and influencers. Each award will have a shortlist of four titles. The shortlists for the first year of the awards will be announced in November, with the category winners revealed in January and the overall winner named in February.
The Costa book awards were scrapped suddenly in 2022, in what the company’s CEO Jill McDonald described as a “difficult decision”. The awards began in 1971, and were known as the Whitbread book awards until 2005, when Costa took over the running and financing.
The last Costa book of the year winner, in 2022, was former teacher Hannah Lowe, for her book of sonnets, The Kids, drawing on her experiences teaching in an inner-city sixth form and which won the poetry prize.
