David Macaulay won the £10,000 (about $12,435) Royal Society's Young People's Book Prize, which honors the best science books for under-14s, for How Machines Work, the Bookseller reported. Chair of judges Dame Julia Higgins said: "This book isn't just dry pages about what engineering is. It's a very exciting story about a sloth that has to get somewhere and in order to get to where he's going he has to build levers, he has to build bridges. Each of the pages is about how he designs a solution to a problem--just what an engineer must do."
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Shortlists for the 2016 Costa Book Awards have been released. Category winners, who each receive £5,000 (about $7,605), will be announced January 3, with the overall £30,000 (about $37,300) Costa Book of the Year winner named January 31. The nominees:
Novel
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain
First novel
The Good Guy by Susan Beale
My Name Is Leon by Kit de Waal
The Words in My Hand by Guinevere Glasfurd
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford
Biography
Dadland: A Journey into Uncharted Territory by Keggie Carew
Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years by John Guy
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar
I'm Not With the Band: A Writer's Life Lost in Music by Sylvia Patterson
Poetry
Sunshine by Melissa Lee-Houghton
Falling Awake by Alice Oswald
Say Something Back by Denise Riley
Let Them Eat Chaos by Kate Tempest
Children's book
The Bombs That Brought Us Together by Brian Conaghan
Orangeboy by Patrice Lawrence
The Monstrous Child by Francesca Simon
Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford
