“We were captivated by the poetry in this special, original, compassionate, uplifting and accessible book that readers will go back to again and again.”

That’s how Andrew Neil summed up the 2010 Costa Book of the Year judges’ admiration for this year’s winning book – Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability. His praise was richly deserved but even so, Shapcott’s triumph took the literary world by surprise. For a start, it’s the second year running that a poet has scooped the Costa (Christopher Reid won last year for A Scattering). But not only that, the hot favourite for this year’s £30,000 prize was Edmund de Waal’s extraordinary memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes.

Of Mutability is Shapcott’s first book in almost a decade. In the intervening years she has undergone treatment for breast cancer (her doctors are name-checked in the acknowledgements) and even though she has insisted in interviews that she isn’t “someone chasing her own ambulance,” it’s clear that her bold, beautiful poems about change are rooted in her own experience.

The 2010 Costa shortlist was a particularly impressive one, with all five books meriting their place in the final. The others in contention included a novel about a young couple reeling from a traumatic birth, a tale of female infanticide and a children’s novel set in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand that First Held Mine, skilfully weaves two narratives together – one about a young girl who carves out an independent  new life in 1950s London after being sent down from university and the other about a  couple struggling to cope with the birth of their first baby. Kishwar Desai’s first novel, Witness the Night, relates how a traumatised young girl is found barely alive in a house where 13 people have been murdered, while Out of Shadows is Jason Wallace’s hard-hitting story of a boy sent to a tough Zimbabwean boarding school in the 1980s.

When the overall winner was announced in London this week, I too reckoned Edmund de Waal would win. But having read all the contenders, all five are exceptional books. And you can’t ask more than that of the Costa awards. Read them all.