Filer and McBride among SoA award winners

More than £82,000 has been awarded to 29 authors and poets at the Society of Authors’ Awards 2014, including Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction winner Eimear McBride and Costa winner Nathan Filer.

2013 Costa winner Nathan Filer was awarded The Betty Trask Prize (£10,000) for The Shock of the Fall (The Borough Press). Meanwhile four Betty Trask Awards (£3,750 each) were also presented to NoViolet Bulawayo for We Need New Names (Vintage), Sam Byers for Idiopathy (Fourth Estate), Mave Fellowes for Chaplin & Company (Vintage) and Matt Greene for Ostrich (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

Eimear McBride, who won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction this year for A Girl is Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press), was awarded a Travelling Scholarship Award (£1,500) that enables authors to travel and keep in touch with colleagues abroad. Authors Daljit Nagra and Michela Wrong was also awarded the anonymously-sponsored travel scholarship.

The £5,000 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, which was presented by the sponsors, Flora Fraser and Peter Soros, was awarded to Charles Moore for Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not For Turning (Penguin).

Five £1,500 Cholmondeley Awards went to W N Herbert, Jeremy Hooker, John James, Glyn Maxwell and Denise Riley, for their body of work and contribution to poetry.

Five poets under 30 were also awarded the £4,000 Eric Gregory Awards, which is now in its 54th year. The winners were Sophie Collins, Emily Hasler, Martha Sprackland, Chloe Stopa-Hunt and David Tait.

The SoA also administer two awards that both published and unpublished authors can enter, the McKitterick Prize, for a first novel by an author over the age of 40, and the Tom-Gallon Trust Award, for a short story. The £4,000 McKitterick Prize was won by full-time surgeon, mother of four children and sometime Horizon presenter, Gabriel Weston, for her first novel Dirty Work (Vintage). The runner-up was essayist and journalist Gabriel Gbadamosi who won £1,000 for "Vauxhall".

The Tom-Gallon Award short story winner was Benjamin Myers for The Folk Song Singer, who received £1,000 and the runner-up was biographer Claire Harman for Poor Maggie Kirkpatrick, who received £500.

The Somerset Maugham Awards enable writers to enrich their work through foreign travel and are given for a published work of any genre (other than drama) by a writer under 35. There were three winners this year, Nadifa Mohamed for The Orchard of Lost Souls (Simon & Schuster) who received £4,000, Daisy Hildyard for Hunters in the Snow (Vintage) who also received £4,000, and Amy Sackville for Orkney (Granta) who received £2,000.

The third British Council Award for ELT Writing, recognising outstanding contribution by an English Language Teaching author or authors, was awarded to Gavin Dudeney, Nicky Hockly and Mark Pegrum for Digital Literacies (Routledge).

The awards were presented by A L Kennedy (pictured) at a ceremony held at London's Army and Navy Club.