Author Hilary Mantel holds her award for the overall prize for her book ''Bring up the Bodies'' at the Costa Book Awards in central London, January 29, 2013. Mantel won the award for best overall book.

LONDON | Tue Jan 29, 2013 4:07pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - British novelist Hilary Mantel added to her groaning trophy cabinet on Tuesday, picking up the Costa Book Award 2012 for "Bring Up the Bodies," her historical novel about the life and court of Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell.

The acclaimed bestseller has already won the Man Booker prize for fiction, making Mantel the first Briton and first woman to win that coveted award twice.

The 60-year-old also won the Booker Prize in 2009 for "Wolf Hall," the first installment in what will be a trilogy.

Broadcaster Jenni Murray, chair of the nine-member panel who decided which of five Costa category winners would take the overall prize, said "Bring Up the Bodies" stood "head and shoulders" above the rest.

"This is a very difficult prize to judge, because there are five categories and they are so different," she told reporters ahead of a reception in London announcing the winner.

"It's not an easy prize to judge, but I have to say today one book simply stood head and shoulders - more than head and shoulders, on stilts - above the rest."

Mantel had been the bookmakers' favorite for the award, which comes with a cheque for 30,000 pounds ($47,000). Category winners each win 5,000 pounds.

Asked whether the judges had considered giving the prize to another author to spread the spoils of literary awards, which usually bring with them a sizeable spike in sales, she replied:

"We know this has had lots of prizes. We couldn't allow the number of times it's already been lauded to affect our decision. It was quite simply the best book."

Murray praised what she called the "poetic" prose of the novel, which traces the downfall of Anne Boleyn in 16th century England and Henry's dangerous attraction to Jane Seymour.

"It's so set in its time so you know exactly where you are and who you are with, but it's also incredibly modern," she said. "I have no doubt that I want to go back to it. I've read it twice and I want to read it again."

ALL-FEMALE SHORTLIST

"Bring Up the Bodies," which like Wolf Hall will be adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company, was one of an all-female shortlist in 2012.

Journalist, critic and writer Francesca Segal's debut novel "The Innocents," set in a Jewish community in northwest London and modeled on Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," won the Costa First Novel Award.

Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie won the poetry prize for her collection "The Overhaul," and writer/illustrator and dyslexia campaigner Sally Gardner claimed the Costa Children's Book Award for "Maggot Moon."

Husband-and-wife team Bryan and Mary Talbot jointly won the Costa Biography Award for "Dotter of her Father's Eyes," a biography of James Joyce's daughter interwoven with a memoir of the author's own troubled relationship with her father, Joycean scholar James S. Atherton.

Mary Talbot, a scholar and author, teamed up with Bryan, who has worked on underground comics and superhero stories including "Judge Dredd" and "Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight".

Their collaboration was the first graphic work to win a Costa category award.

The Costa awards go to writers based in the UK and Ireland for a work published in the last year. They were established in 1971 by Whitbread but were renamed after Costa Coffee took over the sponsorship.

The 2011 Costa Book of the Year was "Pure" by Andrew Miller.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

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1 of 5. A woman poses with a copy of author J K Rowling's first adult fiction book The Casual Vacancy after it went on sale at a bookshop in central London, September 27, 2012.

LONDON | Thu Sep 27, 2012 12:55pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - J.K. Rowling's first foray into adult fiction was bound to be compared to her wildly successful Harry Potter series, and, while "The Casual Vacancy" has earned mixed reviews, for some critics the magic has worn off.

The Casual Vacancy, which hits the shelves on Thursday, looks destined for the top of the bestseller lists whatever the reaction, with Rowling's celebrity status guaranteeing public anticipation and media attention in equal measure.

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani likened some of Rowling's small-minded, snobby characters to the odious Dursley family from the Harry Potter tales.

"One can only admire her gumption in facing up to the overwhelming expectations created by the global phenomenon that was Harry Potter," Kakutani wrote.

"Unfortunately, the real-life world she has limned in these pages is so willfully banal, so depressingly cliched that 'The Casual Vacancy' is not only disappointing — it's dull."

Other critics were less damning, however, and several reviews in British and U.S. newspapers argued that, while not great, Rowling's eagerly anticipated break from the world of child wizards and witches was good.

"The Casual Vacancy is no masterpiece, but it's not bad at all: intelligent, workmanlike, and often funny," said Theo Tait in the Guardian newspaper.

"The worst you could say about it, really, is that it doesn't deserve the media frenzy surrounding it. And who nowadays thinks that merit and publicity have anything do with each other?"

WORTH THE HYPE?

Book stores opened early in London to deal with anticipated demand, and the print run in the United States alone is reported to be two million copies.

That build up is understandable. The series-concluding "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", which appeared in 2007, became the fastest-selling book in history. More than 450 million copies of the seven Potter books have sold worldwide.

The Casual Vacancy is set in a small English town called Pagford, where class prejudices are played out and Rowling exploits her post-Potter freedom by tackling themes of drug addiction, teenage sex and violent domestic abuse.

The plot is set in motion by the death of Barry, which creates a "casual vacancy" on the local municipal ("parish") council and gives his opponents an opportunity to offload a nearby run-down housing estate on to a neighboring district and be done with its seedy inhabitants.

Andrew Losowsky of the Huffington Post website, said Rowling's foray into adult fiction was worth publishing, but perhaps did not match the giddy anticipation surrounding its release.

"Would this book be published if it weren't for the name on the cover? Almost certainly. Would anyone pay much attention to it, and its message? Probably not."

But he also argued that Rowling should not give up on adult fiction, even though the 47-year-old Briton has declared that her next book is most likely to be another children's story.

"Though some sequences feel a few drafts short of being ready, others are written with a fluency and beauty that suggest that there could be more and better works to come from her pen."

In The Independent newspaper, Boyd Tonkin believed Rowling was at her best when describing the younger characters.

"The teens of Winterdown belong in a bolder, richer book than some of the parental caricatures," he said. "All the social and hormonal turbulence that the later Potter volumes had to veil in the euphemisms of fantasy appear in plain sight here."

The conservative Daily Telegraph broadsheet took umbrage at Rowling's skewering of the middle class.

"While Rowling gives due respect to the poorer, damaged characters, higher up the social scale she is busy carving grotesques," wrote Allison Pearson in a three-star review.

Although Rowling is dubbed the world's first author billionaire, she started her literary life in the 1990s as an unemployed single mother living on state benefits who struggled to find a publisher. She is a long-time Labor Party supporter.

Perhaps the conclusion Rowling will least want to read came from Monica Hesse in The Washington Post.

"Throughout 'The Casual Vacancy' I could not stop from having one overarching thought, which the devoted fan in me loathes to share since I'm certain it's the one Rowling is most loath to hear: This book would be a little better if everyone were carrying wands."

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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