Sarah Perry crowns a much-garlanded year for her gothic romp, honoured alongside authors including Kiran Millwood Hargrave and JK Rowling
Two word-of-mouth bookselling success stories – Sarah Perry’s novel The Essex Serpent and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s young adult tale The Girl of Ink and Stars – have taken the top prizes at the British Book Awards.
A gothic romp inspired by a local legend in the author’s native Essex, Perry’s second novel had an astonishing trajectory, selling more than 200,000 copies in hardback alone – 40 times more than the initial sales target – and scooping up nominations as varied as the Costa fiction award to the Wellcome prize for books about medicine and health. At the ceremony in London on Monday night, Perry’s novel beat Sebastian Barry’s Costa prize-winning novel Days Without End and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which won the 2016 Man Booker prize, to take the fiction award, before also winning the overall “book of the year”.
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