Stuart Kelly: Costa isn't everyone's cup of tea

Perusing the shortlist for the Costa Awards, it struck me that this is a prize still uncertain of its identity. Having four categories – novel, first novel, poetry and children's – competing for an overall prize is always going to be comparing apples with artichokes, aluminium and aardvarks. In its previous incarnation as the Whitbread Awards, it swung between highbrow poetry (Heaney and Hughes taking the prize between them for four years), brick-sized biography and innovative fictio

The first two years as the Costa, when the prize went to first William Boyd and then AL Kennedy, seemed to keep its aspiration as a rival to the Booker. This year's shortlist seems far tamer: Chris Cleave, Sebastian Barry, Patrick McGrath and Louis de Bernières compete for the Novel of the Year and half the biographies are memoirs. There are fewer women, fewer risk-takers, and only Keith Gray in the Children's Award is flying the Saltire. The real shock is de Bernières – widely loved for Captain Corelli, but critically tarred and feathered for his new novel, A Partisan's Daughter ("sour and charmless", "his pretensions to nastiness are perhaps the main thing that uphold the idea that he is a literary writer"). Perhaps the overall choice this year will give some indication as to what Costa intend the Award to reflect.

Saved from the ashes

The dead have an awful lot of books coming out next year. The catalogues had already announced a "new" Mickey Spillane (d. 2006) and a "new" Virginia Andrews (d. 1986). The biggest dead name is Vladimir Nabokov (above, d. 1977), whose The Original Of Laura, written on 138 index cards, was nearly burnt by his son. Having overcome his pyromaniacal tendencies, Nabokov Jnr is happy to reveal that the "not necessarily always pleasant – shocking in some ways" work, about a promiscuous woman and her overweight husband, will be published soon.

The dinosaurs that time forgot

The "Earliest Dinosaur in Literature" is proving quite a trouble to judge: many readers have mentioned the battle between the Plesiosaur and the Ichthyosaur in Jules Verne's Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1864) – but they're not technically dinosaurs (Sauropterygia, if we're being pedantic). Still no cigar for Conan Doyle, since Vladimir Obruchev had underground dinosaurs in his 1915 novel Plutonia. And Dickens mentions a Megalosaurus in Bleak House in 1852 – but it's an image rather than an appearance. Any bids before 1852?

Exploding think bubbles

It's been a week of celebrations at our library-come-house, as Mrs Browser was made Lecturer on the brand new MA in Creative Writing at Napier University. But the real whoops of joy were from me, when I found out her colleague will be David Bishop, former editor of 2000AD, and author of the Doctor Who novels. My long cherished ambition to become a comic-book character quickens apace…

Some don't like it hot

Poor publishers Simon & Schuster are subject to multiple law-suits over their "humorous" Christmas title Hot Chicks With Douchebags. One Michael Minelli, at the time a doorman at the "Rehab" party, is predictably disgruntled at being described as a douchebag – apparently, an Americanism for an unattractive individual. Worse, three young ladies (the aforementioned "hot chicks") are suing, not because they resent being objectified, but because the book implies that they might consider dating a "douchebag". Maybe it could be the subtitle for The Original Of Laura.