IRISH AUTHOR SALLY Rooney has been announced as the winner of the Costa Novel Award for 2018, for her novel Normal People. 

The 27-year-old is the youngest person to ever win the Novel Award with her follow-up to her 2017 debut Conversations With Friends.

Normal People centres on the relationship between two teenagers as they go through secondary school in the west of Ireland and later university in what Costa described as a “coming-of-age love story”.

Judges said the novel “would electrify any reader”. Rooney also won the Eason Book Club Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards late last year, and made the longlist for last year’s Man Booker Prize for Normal People.

Oscar-nominated director Lenny Abrahamson and Element Pictures are set to adapt the novel for the BBC.

Each of the awards – open to authors from the UK and Ireland – announced yesterday come with a £5,000 prize and are now eligible for the grand prize of 2018 Costa Book of the Year.

The winning authors were selected from 641 entries.

Other winners included Stuart Turton, who won the Costa First Novel Award for murder mystery book The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and JO Morgan, who won the poetry gong for Assurances.

The winner of the Costa Book of the Year award will be announced at a ceremony in London on Tuesday 29 January.