Booker winner Hilary Mantel with Wolf Hall, her fictional retelling of the life of Thomas Cromwell, is shown Oct. 6 in London. Wolf Hall is now vying for the Costa Book Award. (Alastair Grant/Associated Press)

British author Hilary Mantel, who won the 2009 Booker Prize, also has been nominated for the Costa Book Award for her novel Wolf Hall, a fictional telling of the life of Thomas Cromwell.

She will compete for the $8,800 Cdn fiction prize against Penelope Lively for Family Album, Christopher Nicholson for The Elephant Keeper and Ireland's Colm Toibin for Brooklyn.

The Costa, formerly called the Whitbread, is an award that honours fiction, first novel, biography, poetry and children's writing. After winners are chosen in each category, they compete for the over $43,955 Cdn in prize money.

Mantel's Wolf Hall is a vividly told tale of Tudor intrigue about the blacksmith's son who rose to become one of the most powerful men in England.

Lively, a Booker winner herself for Moon River, is nominated for Family Album, about adult children who return to the family home and the memories it holds for them.

Toibin writes about an Irish immigrant's adjustment to post-Second World War America in Brooklyn and The Elephant B oy is about a young stable boy who forms an attachment to two elephants in 18th-century Britain.

The nominees for best first novel:

• Rachel Heath for The Finest Type of English Womanhood.
• Peter Murphy for John the Revelator.
• Raphael Selbourne for Beauty.
• Ali Shaw for The Girl with Glass Feet.

The nominees for biography:

• Graham Farmelo for The Strangest Man - The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius.
• William Fiennes for his memoir The Music Room.
• Simon Gray for Coda, his memoir about dying of cancer.
• Caroline Moorehead for Dancing to the Precipice, about the life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, a courtier who survived the French Revolution and fled to the New World.

The nominees for poetry:

• Clive James for Angels Over Elsinore,
• Katharine Kilalea for One Eyed Leigh.
• Ruth Padel for Darwin: A Life in Poems.
• Christopher Reid for A Scattering.

The nominees for children's literature:

• Siobhan Dowd for Solace of the Road.
• Mary Hoffman for Troubadour.
• Patrick Ness for The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking: Book Two).
• Anna Perera for Guantanamo Boy.

The category winners will be announced Jan. 5.