The Costa Book Awards consistently pick winners that are both of the moment and subsequently endure. It's our pleasure to confirm this year's Category Winners.
First Novel Award Winner
Book: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Author: Gail Honeyman
Eleanor is 31 years old; work finishes on a Friday and begins again on a Monday. Between, her only company will be two bottles of vodka and her own unique wisdom. It is an unexpected shared experience suddenly opens the door to possibility. Challenging reader expectations with a living, breathing character, Gail Honeyman's debut is a funny and moving diamond.
Biography Award Winner
Book: In the Days of Rain
Author: Rebecca Stott
The Exclusive Brethren were a closed community who believed the world is ruled by Satan. Into this is born Rebecca. Her father had been an influential Brethren Minister. As her father lay dying, he begged her to help him write the memoir. He wanted to tell the story of their family who for generations had all been members of a fundamentalist Christian sect.
Poetry Award Winner
Book: Inside the Wave
Author: Helen Dunmore
To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead — the underworld and the human living world – and the acutely intense being of both.
Children's Award Winner
Book: The Explorer
Author: Katherine Rundell, Hannah Horn
Four children survive their aircraft plunging into the Amazon jungle, but for Fred and his friends, it's only the beginning of a cruel battle for survival. Filled with adventure and a real command of character and incident, Rundell has few peers in superb children's fiction.
Music is said to be a universal language. But for Chase Burton, a deaf filmmaker from Texas, music has always been a profoundly different experience.
"When I was a kid, I'd lie on the floor above our garage so I could feel the vibrations from my brother's band rocking out below my body," the 33-year-old told CNN. "That was one of the first times I began building a relationship with music."
In 2016, his ability to experience music changed dramatically, thanks to California-based technology company Not Impossible Labs.
It designed a vibrating suit that enables deaf people to "feel" music through their skin. Consisting of a body harness, ankle and wrist straps, the device translates audio into a range of vibrating pulses that are felt at 24 contact points. Burton has been testing the suit for four years.
The sound hits different parts of your body, said Burton. "Maybe it will strike me down in my ankles first. And then I'll start to feel the vibrations in my back. And then I'll feel some pulsations in my wrist."
The creators want to extend the tactile musical experience beyond the deaf community. In 2018, they gave out 150 of the wearables at a rock concert in Las Vegas where half the audience members were deaf and half were hearing.
Since then, Not Impossible Labs has been working to improve the technology and says it's ready to go to market soon. Eventually, the creators want the device to become a consumer product, accessible to all. The company's talent and business development director, Jordan Richardson, told CNN that the technology could be incorporated into live sports broadcasts, video games, theme parks or museum installations. The newest digital streaming movie releases could have built in 'vibe-tracks' to 'feel' the movie. He said. "We truly think that anything that has an audio element can also have a vibrational experience associated with it as well."
Balancing preservation of the land with our desire to travel is a challenge for us travelers. When seeing cities face constant resource and waste problems, I couldn't help but think about how much travel can affect the environment.
Back in my youth, I was an environmental activist. But over the years, I leave the lights on. I fly a lot. I drink out of plastic bottles. I eat a lot of meat. And I love fish, especially tuna. However, recently, I've begun thinking harder about how travel affects the environment and how I affect the environment. In doing so, I've tried to be a lot more aware of my actions.
I don't know if there is an easy solution for this problem. The most environmentally friendly activity is not to travel at all, but that's unrealistic and too extreme. There's so much money in travel that I don't think the government and regulation can do much. Only when their profits are hurt will hotels, operators, and the industry as a whole begin to listen. Instead, it's all about the consumers. The only good way is to get people to be more environmentally conscious and make better decisions.
Consumers have a lot of power. Why did Wal-Mart start selling only sustainable fish and whole milk? Consumers wanted it. I think if we as travelers begin to demand more environmentally friendly practices and avoid companies with poor environmental records, we can change things.
Now, I recycle more, I use fewer water bottles, I shut off the lights, Most importantly, I use operators and stay at places that are reducing their environmental impact.
Travel can destroy the environment but it doesn't have to. We have the power to make things better. We can do small things and demand more of the places we stay and visit. We can and should demand more of places, and of ourselves.
More than a billion people around the world have smart phones, almost all of which come with navigation (导航) apps such as Google or Apple Maps. This raises the questions we meet with any technology: what skills are we losing? What abilities are we gaining?
Talking with people who're good at finding their way around or using paper maps, I often hear lots of frustration with digital maps. North/South direction gets messed up, and you can see only a small sections at a time.
But consider what digital navigation aids have meant for someone like me. Despite being a frequent traveler, I'm so terrible at finding my way that I still use Google Maps every day in the small town where I have lived for many years. What looks like an imperfect product to some has been a significant expansion of my own abilities.
Part of the problem is that reading paper maps requires specific skills. There is nothing natural about them. In many developed nations, including the U.S., one expects street names and house numbers to be meaningful references, and instructions such as "go north for three blocks and then west" make sense. In Istanbul, in contrast, where I grew up, none of those hold true. For one thing, the locals rarely use street names. Why bother when a government or a military group might change them again? Besides, the city is full of winding, ancient alleys that meet newer avenues at many angles. Instructions as simple as "go north" would require a helicopter or a bulldozer.
Let's come back to my original questions. While we often lose some skills after leaving the work to technology, it may also allow us to expand our abilities. Consider the calculator: I don't doubt our arithmetic skills might have dropped a bit as the little machines became common, but calculations that once boring and tricky are now much more straightforward and one can certainly do more complex calculations more confidently.
Many of us like to dine out and treat ourselves to delicious food. We are used to choosing hearty fat-filled dishes and sugar-charged desserts, which are not easily cooked at home.
According to Economic Daily, low-calorie, low-fat and high-fiber meals have become popular in China's restaurants and online delivery platforms.
According to a report released by a major online food delivery platform, the number of light meals ordered online also rose 75 percent from the previous year.
Having a light meal, however, doesn't mean eating only vegetables. Different from the meat-free lifestyle, a typical light dish avoids oily, salty and spicy food. Healthy nutrients are the theme of the light meal.
These dishes are useful for keeping healthy and controlling your weight. Diners see it as "a great way to avoid bloating," wrote the Telegraph.
These changes in eating behavior are connected to deeper changes in how people think about food, says Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health, US. "Diet quality, not quantity, is important for both weight control and long-term well-being," Willett told The New York Times.
So the next time you have a party with friends, try a light meal.
A. That's probably why so many people, especially millennials are into them.
B. The country saw a rapid expansion of restaurants specializing in light meals.
C. People tend to choose the food they suit their taste.
D. Instead, it contains things like boiled meat, whole grains, fruits and vegetables.
E. So light meals have a promising future.
F. It will satisfy not only your stomachs but maybe also your hearts.
G. The recent rise of light meals, however, gives diners a smarter choice.
I was out in my fields, spade in hand, planting trees this morning. I feel good when I do it, knowing that long after I am gone, these trees will 1 high above the land, providing oxygen for humans not yet born and 2 the carbon dioxide from the air.
Each spring, as I am 3, my mind goes back to a 4 I have of my grandfather, walking with him on the land, listening to his 5 and learning about nature. He often told a story which has 6 in my imagination all these years.
It was in the early 1900s, a man lost his wife and daughter to a terrible disease. Filled with 7, he decided to take up the 8 occupation of shepherd in the hills. He was about 55 years of age at that time, and as he 9 his sheep, he looked around and saw the land was 10. Then the old man felt he needed to do something to help the land11, for it had once been a splendid green forest.
He collected some 12 of oak trees from other places, 13 watered them and cared for the young trees that sprouted the next year. For the rest of his life, he planted every day. No one knew his story until he was 90 years old. Yet he 14 to plant, perhaps only five trees a day. At that time, the hill had become a green forest, 15 as far as people could see.
There is no doubt that humankind dreams of making Mars our second home. However, sending people there will require all the skills, courage and (intelligent) of the human race. While the Moon can be reached within days, it would take months to reach Mars, (travel) through dangerous solar radiation. And even if the first settlers do reach Mars safely, staying alive will be daily challenge, but as proved by the Biosphere experiment, not impossible.
As early as the 1980s, scientists were building Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert. It consisted of a closed space people, animals and plants could live together. The "closed" concept meant that the space was designed (function) with its own oxygen, food and water, needing nothing from the outside world. the two-year experiment was not a success, it did provide us with a better understanding of how humans might be able to live on another planet. More recently, scientists (succeed) in growing a variety of plants in an environment similar to that on Mars. That (definite) is a big step forward.
For now, human settlement of Mars is still (decade) away. In the meantime, scientific research shows that the planet Earth is getting (warm). This change is having a terrible effect on the biosphere.
There are some important regulations parents can take to make sure their kids use cell phones in a safe and responsible way. When kids know what the consequences are when rules aren't followed, that makes life more predictable for them.
Most kids are not paying for their cell phones or their cell phone plans, so if you pay for it, you own it, which means you have the right to take it away anytime if they disobey the rules you set up earlier.
After a kid has a cell phone, suddenly parents discover data runs out half way through the month. This can get expensive and your kids need to know how to monitor their use. Also, teen cell phone addiction should be limited. Generally, it's a good idea to have no cell phone policy while they are doing homework and at bedtime. Come to agreement in advance about what they are and aren't allowed to download on their cell phone. There are some really bad apps for kids that you don't want on their phones.
Make sure your kids understand how to set up their privacy. Talk with them about why guarding their privacy is so important. Many teens truly have no concept about everything that a cell phone can share about them including personal information and their location.
You want to cover what is and isn't appropriate to share via a cell phone. This definitely means photos and language used in emails and on social media. But don't forget simpler things like providing their address, their age or what school they go to online.
Lastly, there are times and places when using one's cell phone is not appropriate. In movie theaters or during class time at school the phone should be on silent and put away. Additionally, when someone is having a face to face conversation with them, they need to be looking at the person, not their phone.
