The finalists for the 2004 Whitbread awards have been announced in all categories – that’s Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book. The awards are given to the best books of the past year by writers based in the UK and Ireland.

This year there were 450 entries, the second highest ever. There was also a record number of books in the Children’s Book Award category (113). The shortlist for the Children’s award is also remarkable for having only female writers.

So here they are:

The novel category has 2004 Man Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst with The Line of Beauty, and Orange Prize winner Andrea Levy for Small Island; also Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories (she won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995 with Behind the Scenes at the Museum, but this is a new genre for her: crime) and last but by no means least, Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings, a novel set in Gallipoli-era Turkey in a small village where Christian and Muslims find that love may conquer all …

Susanna Clarke may possibly be mollified after her non-event at the Bookers by inclusion in the first novel category for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. She shares the list with Richard Collins’ The Land as Viewed from the Sea; Susan Fletcher’s Eve Green and Panos Karnezis with The Maze.

The biographies were interesting: John Guy with My Heart is my Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (love those feisty royal chicks); David McKie, Jabez: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Rogue about a rather naughty 19th century MP; John Sutherland for Stephen Spender who was a 20th century poet, and Jeremy Treglown with V.S. Pritchett: A Life.

The Poetry shortlist includes two debut collections, one by Leontia Flynn, a Northern Ireland poet. Her collection, These Days was lauded by the judges: ‘She has exceptional insight and the writerly rigour of a poet many years her senior…’ they said. John Fuller’s 15th collection, Ghosts ‘explores the grey areas between life and death’. Matthew Hollis’s debut, Ground Water was ‘comforting, enlightening and … fluid’ – well, no doubt. And finally, Michael Symmons Roberts’s Corpus is all about bodies: ‘Mystical, philosophical and erotic, the bodies in these poems move between different worlds – life and after-life, death and resurrection – encountering pathologists’ blades, geneticists’ maps and the wounds of love and war.’ Delectably gross, no doubt.

Finally, the Children’s Book shortlist. All but one sounds hardly like childrens’ fodder to me - Anne Cassidy’s Looking for JJ is about a 10-year-old child murderer who comes out after six years in a secure unit – ohhh, sweet; Geraldine McCaughrean’s Not the End of the World is about Noah’s daughter who, after seeing her friends mercilessly washed away – nice! – hatches a plan to thwart God’s plan; and How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff is narrated by a 15-year-old New Yorker who is sent to live with British cousins, all very jolly, but then their lives are ripped apart by war. Ann Turnbull's No Shame, No Fear sounds tediously fluffy by comparison; it's the story of two young people forbidden to be together, set in England in the 1600s.

Judges this year included writer, broadcaster and former Cabinet Minister Roy Hattersley; authors Jenny Colgan, Amanda Craig, Kevin Crossley-Holland and Joanne Harris; poet and author Lavinia Greenlaw and ITV news presenter Katie Derham.

The winners, (they’ll know who they are on Wednesday 6th January) will each receive £5,000. The winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year will receive £25,000 and will be selected and announced at the Whitbread Book Awards ceremony in central London on Tuesday 25th January. For more info on the shortlist etc, go to the Whitbread site.