is it too much to ask?” He said the Costa prize rewarded the books people wanted to read while the Man Booker was the books people “ought to read”. They are the basis for so many of our movies and documentaries. “I do think they should have a dedicated books programme … the BBC owes it to books to put something back. Back in the 1970s, he said, there were two programmes, The Book Programme with Robert Robinson and Read All About It with Melvyn Bragg. Harris praised the Costas, which began life as the Whitbread prize back in 1971, and used his speech to rebuke the BBC for not having a television programme devoted to books, a decision he described as an “absolute disgrace”. Smith has already won the Goldsmiths and Saltire prizes but missed out on the Costa along with Jonathan Edwards’ poetry My Family and Other Superheroes Emma Healey’s debut, Elizabeth is Missing and Kate Saunders’ children’s book Five Children on the Western Front.

Probably close was the bookmakers’ favourite to win the prize, Ali Smith’s How To Be Both, which it later emerged was runner-up in last year’s Man Booker prize. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald Photograph: Costa book awards/PA “Having been in literary prizes myself and been told I’ve come second – believe me, it’s no comfort.” By the end it was a decisive if not unanimous vote, although Harris declined to go into details. It took judges 90 minutes to decide the overall winner with support for all five of them. So the best novel goes up against the best biography, best poetry, best debut and best children’s book. The Costa is different to other prizes in that it pits individual category winners against each other. Harris said it was at the back of judges’ minds that it had already won a big literary prize but “it’s very hard to say: ‘OK, this has had its place in the sun’”. Woven into the book is a biography of TH White, who also tried to train a goshawk more than 60 years before her.

It tells of how the Cambridge historian, illustrator and naturalist was so overcome by grief after the death of her father that she went almost mad and decided to train the most untameable of raptors, the goshawk. Helen Macdonald (left) poses with other Costa book award nominees, Ali Smith, Emma Healey, Jonathan Edwards and Kate Saunders.

Helen macdonald cambridge