Scottish novelist Stef Penney has won the Costa book of the year prize for her Canada-set historical novel The Tenderness of Wolves (published here by Penguin Canada and reviewed by Q&Q here). Penney had already won in the first-book category; to take the £25,000 main prize, she beat out such contenders as William Boyd’s Restless (which won in the fiction category) and Brian Thompson’s Keeping Mum (biography).

Penney has discussed her agoraphobia publicly before, and The Guardian doesn’t miss the chance to work the human-interest angle mercilessly: their headline is “Agoraphobic tells of her struggle to win book prize.”