Costa Novel Award goes to Colm Tóibin

Costa, the UK's fastest-growing coffee shop chain, has announced the Costa Book Awards 2009 winners in the Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book categories.

They are:

* Irish novelist Colm Tóibin, who beats Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize, to take the Costa Novel Award for Brooklyn

* Raphael Selbourne, who wins the First Novel Award for Beauty, the story of a young Bangladeshi woman on the run from her family, inspired by his experiences of teaching in a deprived area of Wolverhampton

* Debut biographer Graham Farmelo who takes the Biography Award for his work on the pioneer of quantum mechanics, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, which the judges called "the most compelling biography of the year"

* Christopher Reid who, having been nominated twice previously, finally claims the Poetry Award for A Scattering, a tribute to his wife following her death in 2005

* Patrick Ness, who wins the Children's Book Award for The Ask and the Answer (Book Two of the Chaos Walking trilogy) which the judges acclaimed as "a major achievement in the making"