And the Whitbread Award winners are….

…for the most part, rather surprising, as the Guardian finds out. Andrea Levy took the fiction prize, holding off Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning LINE OF BEAUTY and Kate Atkinson’s marvellous CASE HISTORIES.

25-year-old Susan Fletcher surprised many by triumphing in the Best First Novel category (for her novel EVA GREEN) over Susanna Clarke, while a biography of Mary, Queen of Scots took the Non-Fiction prize.  In children’s, Geraldine McCaughrean takes the prize for NOT THE END OF THE WORLD and Michael Symmons Roberts wins in poetry.

Now all the category winners will face off in the Overall Whitbread award, and Levy is, unsurprisingly, the favorite to take it.

More coverage in the Independent, the Times, the BBC, the Telegraph, and the Jamaica Observer.