'Unremittingly Bleak' Scottish Writer Wins Costa Book Award

Novelist and comedian Alison Kennedy has won the £25,000 Costa Book of the Year Award.

The author, who writes under the name AL Kennedy, won for her fifth novel, Day, about Alfred Day, a psychologically damaged RAF gunner who returns to Germany in 1949, where he had been a prisoner of war, hoping to slay his demons.

The Glaswegian author, whose previous novels include Original Bliss and Everything You Need, was the bookies' red hot favourite, though the author's win may not guarantee her the huge sales' boost that traditionally follows a big prize.

Kennedy, 42 and single, has a reputation for writing unremittingly bleak books - she has recently been treated for depression, in interviews she wears a gloomy world-weariness on her sleeve and she has admitted "my life is not comfortable to me" - and her winning novel is no exception.

One critic said of Day: "The irritable, hopeless tiredness of her hero permeates the reader the way damp pervades bones. Kennedy does bleak the way Russians do epic."

Kennedy's uncompromising views include avoiding the London literary scene, denouncing book prizes as "crooked" and questioning whether going to war against Hitler was justified.

Notwithstanding her moroseness, her writing has been called mordantly funny, fresh and teeming with startling ideas.