Posted on January 30, 2019 at 10:00 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Bart van Es’s The Cut Out Girl has won the Costa Book of the Year Award.
The biography beat out the other individual category winners to receive the top prize, which brings £30,000 (about $39,000) in addition to a sales boost.
The Guardian reports that the subject of the book, eighty-five-year-old Lien de Jong, was not only in attendance at the award ceremony on Tuesday, but also came on stage to embrace her biographer.
Van Es’s grandparents, part of the Dutch Resistance during World War II, had hidden with a young Jewish girl.
The girl — de Jong — survived, but in the 1950s, she and the van Es family had a falling-out.
Van Es was able to track her down and convince her that he could (and should) write a book about what she’d lived through.
Read more about the duo’s reaction to the Costa news and more in the Guardian.
Categories: Today in Books