Anne Enright and Sara Baume on Costa awards shortlist

£30,000 overall prize and £5,000 category prizes to be announced in January

Sara Baume, winner of the 2014 Davy Byrne’s Short Story award, left, with Redmond Doran of Davy Byrne’s and Anne Enright, a former winner of the €15,000 award . Both authors have been shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Awards. Photograph: Dave Meehan

Tue Nov 17 2015 - 19:30

Anne Enright has been shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award for The Green Road while Sara Baume has been shortlisted for the 2015 Costa First Novel Award for Spill Simmer Falter Wither, which Enright launched earlier this year in her role as the inaugural Laureate of Irish Fiction.

Enright is up against previous winner Kate Atkinson for A God in Ruins; Patrick Gale for A Place Called Winter; and Melissa Harrison for At Hawthorn Time. In The Green Road, described by the judges as “a masterful portrait of a fractured family told in stark yet sparkling prose,” the children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.

Baume’s rivals are Kate Hamer for The Girl in the Red Coat; Andrew Michael Hurley for The Loney; and Tasha Kavanagh for Things We Have in Common. In Spill Simmer Falter Wither, described by the judges as “a tough but tender, brilliant read full of fresh wonder. One to cherish,” a misfit man, Ray, aged 57, “too old for starting over, too young for giving up”, finds a misfit dog, One Eye, a vicious little bugger, smaller than expected, a good ratter. Both are accustomed to being alone, unloved, outcast – but they quickly find in each other a strange companionship of sorts. As spring turns to summer, their relationship grows and intensifies, until a savage act forces them to abandon the precarious life they’d established, and take to the road.

The two Irish authors are no strangers to awards. Enright won the Man Booker Prize and Irish Novel of the Year for The Gathering; the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for The Portable Virgin; the Encore Award for What Are You Like?; and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz; as well as the Davy Byrnes short story award. Baume also won the latter prize last year, as well as the Hennessy New Irish Writer award.