Stef Penney’s debut novel The Tenderness of Wolves has won one of Britain’s top literary awards, the Costa award. Critics have hailed as an astonishingly assured debut.
Penney landed the award in a close fought fight with novelists William Boyd’s spy drama Restless, and Brian Thompson’s quirky wartime biography Keeping Mum.
The Tenderness of Wolves is a haunting novel about the Canadian wilderness, somewhere Penney has never visited.
The Costa, formally know as the Whitbread award is split into 5 sections, poetry, biography, best novel, first novel, and children’s book. The winner of each category receives a prize of £5,000, and the overall winner gets £25,000.
