Guardian First Book Award Shortlist

Books that challenge orthodoxy and readers' expectations dominate the shortlist for this year's Guardian first book award, which includes a novel influenced by the African tradition of sung history, and a study of error that argues we should celebrate our ability to get things wrong.

Three novels and two non-fiction works are vying for the £10,000 prize.

The shortlist is as follows

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, by Maile Chapman (Jonathan Cape);

Black Mamba Boy, by Nadifa Mohamed (HarperCollins);

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz (Portobello Books);

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson)

Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)

The winner of the prize will be announced on 1 December.

National Book Awards Announced

National Book Awards Announced

Former prime minister Tony Blair is among the contenders for the inaugural Galaxy National Book Awards.

Blair will compete alongside the Duchess of Devonshire and Lord Alan Sugar for the Tesco Biography of the year. Jamie Oliver's Jamie's 30 Minute Meals will be up against Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson for the Tesco Food & Drink Book of the Year, while Jilly Cooper is in the running for Sainbury's Popular Fiction Book of the Year.

2010 Man Booker shortlistees including Tom McCarthy, David Mitchell and last year's winner, Hilary Mantel, are also up for a gong as part of what Amanda Ross, m.d. of Cactus, which is behind the event, described as the “cream of British publishing”.

The winners of the eight categories will be awarded on 10th November. The ceremony will be broadcast on More4 on 13th November, followed by five further tie-in shows in the run-up to Christmas.

The shortlists in full:

Sainsbury's Popular Fiction Book of the Year

Dead Like You Peter James (Macmillan)
The Ice Cream Girls Dorothy Koomson (Sphere)
Jump! Jilly Cooper (Bantam Press)
One Day David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Red Queen Philippa Gregory (Simon & Schuster)
Worth Dying For Lee Child (Bantam Press)

Non-Fiction Book of the Year

Alex's Adventures in Numberland Alex Bellos (Bloomsbury)
At Home Bill Bryson (Doubleday)
D-Day Antony Beevor (Viking)
The Making Of Modern Britain Andrew Marr (Pan)
Must You Go? Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Operation Mincemeat Ben MacIntyre (Bloomsbury)

National Book Tokens New Writer of the Year

Patrick Barkham The Butterfly Isles (Granta Books)
Edmund de Waal The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto & Windus)
Katherine Webb The Legacy (Orion)
Rebecca Hunt Mr Chartwell (Fig Tree)
Natasha Solomons Mr Rosenblum's List (Sceptre)
Simon Lelic Rupture (Picador)

WH Smith Children's Book of the Year

The Great Hamster Massacre Katie Davies, illus Hannah Shaw (Simon and Schuster)
Monsters of Men Patrick Ness (Walker Books)
Mr Stink David Walliams (HarperCollins Childrens Books)
Shadow Michael Morpurgo (HarperCollins Childrens Books)
TimeRiders Alex Scarrow (Puffin)
Zog Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler (Alison Green Books)

Tesco Food & Drink Book of the Year

The Flavour Thesaurus Niki Segnit (Bloomsbury)
Jamie's 30 Minute Meals Jamie Oliver (Michael Joseph)
Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home Nigella Lawson (Chatto & Windus)
Kitchenella Rose Prince (Fourth Estate)
Plenty Yotam Ottolenghi (Ebury Press)
Tender II Nigel Slater (Fourth Estate)

Tesco Biography of the Year

Coco Chanel, The Legend And The Life Justine Picardie (Harper NonFiction)
Decline and Fall: Diaries 2005-2010 Chris Mullin (Profile Books)
The Fry Chronicles Stephen Fry (Michael Joseph)
A Journey Tony Blair (Hutchinson)
Wait For Me Duchess of Devonshire (John Murray)
What You See Is What You Get Alan Sugar (Macmillan)

International Author of the Year

Colm Toibin Brooklyn (Penguin)
Jonathan Franzen Freedom (Fourth Estate)
Stieg Larsson The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Quercus/MacLehose Press)
Kathryn Stockett The Help (Fig Tree)
Emma Donoghue Room (Picador)
Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Tuskar Rock Press)

Waterstone's UK Author of the Year

Tom McCarthy C (Jonathan Cape)
Maggie O'Farrell The Hand That First Held Mine (Headline Review)
Kate Atkinson Started Early, Took My Dog (Doubleday)
David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Sceptre)
Rose Tremain Trespass (Chatto & Windus)
Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate)

William Hill Winner Announced!

The shortlist for the 22nd William Hill Sports Book of the Year, worth a record £22,000, a £2000 free bet and a day at the races to the winner, has been unveiled -

Open by Andre Agassi
Trautmann's Journey by Catrine Clay
A Last English Summer by Duncan Hamilton
Blood Knots by Luke Jennings
Beware of the Dog by Brain Moore
Bounce by Matthew Syed

The winner will be announced on 30th November. Who's your winner?

For more details on the titles visit the COTW subject lists.

Howard Jacobson wins the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010

Howard Jacobson is named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Finkler Question.

London author and columnist Howard Jacobson has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now, but has never before been shortlisted.

Sir Andrew Motion, Chair of the judges comments ‘The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.'

Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel

Mario Vargas Llosa's publisher at Faber has hailed the 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature as "a writer of enormous range, passion and insight".

The Nobel foundation awarded the prize to Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".