The Scottish writer Ali Smith has won a leading literary award for her acclaimed novel How to be Both.
Smith triumphed in the Costa Book Awards last night, winning the novel category for the work.
She is now in the running for the overall Book of the Year category.
How to Be Both, published by Hamish Hamilton, is a novel "about art's versatility".
It has been described as "a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions."
The judges said in a statement: "Deploying her conceit of different beginnings and endings with consummate ease and daring, Ali Smith has pulled off a truly dazzling and inventive story."
Debut author Emma Healey collected the Costa First Novel Award for Elizabeth is Missing, while Helen Macdonald's memoir about training a goshawk after her father's death, H is for Hawk, won the Costa Biography Award.
Jonathan Edwards took the Costa Poetry Award with his debut collection, My Family and Other Superheroes
Kate Saunders won the Costa Children's Book Award for Five Children on the Western Front, set on the eve of World War 1.
Smith has won the category for the second time for her sixth novel.
She first won the Novel Award in 2005 for The Accidental
Christopher Rogers, managing director of Costa, said: "What a fantastic collection of books."
"The Costa Book Awards are all about recognising great writing and a good read and this year's winners are, as always, superb examples of this."
The five Costa Book Award winners, each of whom will receive £5,000, were selected from 640 entries.
The Book of the Year will be announced at an awards ceremony in London on January 27.
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in August 1962 and lives in Cambridge.
She won the Saltire First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award in 1995 for her first collection of stories, Free Love and has since published three further collections including Other Stories and Other Stories and The First Person and Other Stories.
Her novels include Hotel World, which was shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange Prize, and The Accidental which won the Whitbread Novel Award.
Her non-fiction includes Artful, which won the 2013 Bristol Festival of Ideas/Best Book of Ideas.
How to be Both was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize.
In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was made a CBE for Services to Literature in the 2014 New Year's Honours List.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article