1996 Whitbread Awards

Book of the Year

Children's Book

• Anne Fine, The Tulip Touch

• Russell Hoban, The Trokeville Way
• Geraldine McCaughrean, Plundering Paradise
• Philip Pullman, Clockwork or All Wound Up

  First Novel

• John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

• Seamus Deane, Reading In the Dark
• Georgina Hammick, The Arizona Game
• Mary Morrissy, Mother of Pearl

  Novel

• Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man for Himself

• Neil Bartlett, Mr Clive & Mr Page
• J. G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights
• Patrick McGrath, Asylum
• Graham Swift, Last Orders
• Fay Weldon, Worst Fears

  Biography

• Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life

• Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life
• Flora Fraser, The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline
• James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

  Poetry

• Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level

• U. A. Fanthorpe, Safe As Houses
• Alice Oswald, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile
• Christopher Reid, Expanded Universes
• Pauline Stainer, The Wound-dresser’s Dream