Kevin Powers won the £10,000 award Guardian First Book Award for his novel The Yellow Birds. Lisa Allardice, chair of the judging panel and editor of Guardian Review, said Powers "utterly fulfilled the first book award criteria of promise, originality and raw talent" as he "narrowly" beat Katherine Boo's nonfiction book Behind the Beautiful Forevers for the prize.
Allardice praised The Yellow Birds as "a contemporary book about war written by someone who was actually there. Kevin Powers is a poet, and a young Iraq veteran. It's an unusual combination, and while the subject matter is brutal and horrific, the expression of it is very beautiful and poetic."
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Sarah Hall and Jean Sprackland won the Portico Prize for Literature, which honors "works based wholly, or largely, in the north of England," the Bookseller reported. Hall took the fiction prize for The Beautiful Indifference, while Sprackland's Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach was the nonfiction winner. Each author received £10,000 (US$16,035).