It might have made a good cryptic Christmas quiz question: how did coffee take the prize from beer in 2006? The answer speaks volumes about how big business and books have become inextricably intertwined in an age when prizes shift product and corporate sponsorship is so ubiquitous that it goes almost unnoticed.
Last year, in case you failed to notice, the Whitbread Book Awards mutated into the Costa Book Awards. The shortlists for each of the five categories - poetry, novel, first novel, children's book and biography - were announced on 28 November. All over Britain, publishers and authors rushed out to clink cups of cappuccino in celebration. There was a real buzz about the event. I'm making that last bit up, but, once you start pondering the possible reasons why a beer company or a coffee chain should want to court literary credibility in the first place, the more surreal the scenario seems.
Then again, the big book chains all seem to come with cafes attached these days, and surely someone at Waterstone's, whose in-store cafes are run by Costa, is already conducting a survey into the relationship between types of coffee and styles of fiction. Do lovers of chick-lit prefer caramel cappuccinos? Do crime aficionados always opt for a double espresso?
The Costa differs from the Whitbread only in name and, as prizes go, it still tries to cover the waterfront in terms of genre. How they decide on the best overall winner from the above categories remains a mystery to me, even though, as one of the three judges of this year's biography award, I had some insight into the protracted process of selecting a shortlist of four titles from a longlist of about 90.
Most of my summer was taken up with reading biographies of the great, the good and the merely famous. The reading process, though dogged, was oddly enjoyable. Coffee helped (though I prefer Illy, if any of its marketing men should be reading this). The whittling-down process ended for me on a strangely inconclusive note when I found myself staring at four books, none of which I could quite bear to jettison.
In the end, and for reasons I am still not entirely clear about, I sacrificed Byron Rogers's fascinating life of RS Thomas, The Man Who Went Into the West. Like Maggie Fergusson's George Mackay Brown: The Life, which did make the cut, it is that rare thing, a literary biography that is so well written, and whose subject is so eccentric, that it doesn't require a knowledge of the subject, nor even of poetry in general, to be enjoyed. I would urge anyone with a Christmas book token or two to spare to buy them both.
How, though, do you measure a literary biography against a personal memoir, a scholarly endeavour against a confessional? By what criteria do you compare, say, John Burnside's visceral A Lie About My Fatheragainst John Stubbs's exemplary John Donne: The Reformed Soul. It seems to me, having read and enjoyed both in very different ways, that they belong to separate genres. That, for me, was the real dilemma at the heart of the newly titled Costa Biography Award, and one that even a couple of heart-shuddering double espressos could do little to solve.
· The five category winners will be announced this Wednesday, the Costa Book of the Year on 7 February
Costa Biography Award shortlist
George Mackay Brown: The Life. Maggie Fergusson (John Murray)
Donne: The Reformed Soul. John Stubbs (Viking) Nabeel's Song: A Family Story of Survival in Iraq. Jo Tatchell (Sceptre)
Keeping Mum: A Wartime Childhood. Brian Thompson (Atlantic Books)
