The Whitbread Awards 2006

Ali Smith has just been announced as the first Scottish woman to win the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award.Her novel, The Accidental, will now go forward to compete against the four other category winners, who have also just been announced, for the £25,000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

The Accidental almost won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award in November and was shortlisted for last year's Man Booker Prize. The judges described it as 'a glorious work of fiction that inspired both laughter and sadness which none of us could stop reading'. It triumphed over The Clown by former Whitbread prize winner, Salman Rushdie, and Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, to win the £5,000 prize.

Ali Smith was the only female author to be shortlisted for the honour.

The First Novel Award was won by Malaysian-born Tash Aw for The Harmony Silk Factory which tells the story of a journey through the Malaysian jungle in the Second World War. Irish writer Kate Thompson won the Children's Book Award for The New Policeman, which is the story of a boy seeking to find his mother the birthday present of all time. The Biography Award went to Hilary Spurling for Matisse the Master, which documents the artist's lifetime of self-doubt and desperation and Christopher Logue won the Poetry Award for his reworking of The Illiad.

All these writers will now go on the shortlist for the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, which will be announced on 24 January 2006.