A little-known poet who was turned down by a succession of publishers beat competition from several literary heavyweights, including the Nobel prizewinner Seamus Heaney, to win a prestigious literature award yesterday.

John Haynes collected the poetry prize in the Costa Book Awards, formerly the Whitbread Book Awards, for Letter to Patience, set in a small, mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria at a time of political unrest.

The prize, which was won by Heaney twice in the 1990s, was one of five categories.

William Boyd, 54, won the novel category with Restless, a spy story; the former film- maker Stef Penney, 37, was picked for the first novel award for The Tenderness of Wolves, a murder mystery; Brian Thompson, 71, won the biography award for Keeping Mum, a witty account of his childhood; and Linda Newbery, 54, a former Whitbread judge, won the children’s award with Set in Stone. They all go forward to compete for the overall prize, announced on February 7.

Haynes, 70, who spent nearly 20 years as an English lecturer in Nigeria, has written a number of books on African poetry and stories for African children. More recently, he struggled to find a publisher for his own poetry and was rejected by Faber, Bloodaxe and Carcanet.

However, refusing to give in, he tried Seren, a Welsh independent publisher. Amy Wack, its poetry editor, said of his work yesterday: “It’s a fabulous book. It’s such a comprehensive view of a country.”

One of the judges, the poet Elaine Feinstein, was astonished to learn that Letter to Patience had been rejected repeatedly. “We were knocked out by the ease with which he could control the pace of his three-line verse and the richness of the things he remembers about Nigeria,” she said.

Letter to Patience is a vividly atmospheric, book-length poem divided into cantos. The judges called it their “unanimous choice and a clear winner”. Haynes said: “When I was shortlisted I was thrilled. I hadn’t read the poem since the publisher had accepted it. I started to glance through it and thought, ‘This isn’t bad, it has a chance’.”

The awards — Costa took over sponsorship last year — recognise the most enjoyable books of the past year by writers based in Britain and Ireland. Boyd, 54, won the First Novel award in 1981 for A Good Man in Africa. Of Restless the judges said: “Its scenes of wartime tension, the smell of espionage and the consequences of deceitful lives, double cross, double bluff, are all written with effortless clarity resulting in an unputdownable read.”

Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves is a murder mystery set in Canada, a country she has never visited as she is an agoraphobic. The judges said: “We felt enveloped by the snowy landscape and gripped by the beautiful writing and effortless storytelling.”

Thompson’s Keeping Mum was described as the perfect antidote to the “misery memoir” and Newbery’s Set in Stone as “beautifully crafted”.

The five winners receive £5,000 each. They were selected from 580 entries, the highest total ever received in one year.

'Our unanimous chouce ... a clear winner'

Canto XII from Letter to Patience

We are time. Time’s wheel, time’s stone arrowhead.
time’s timeless present tense, not now,
not this,
not here, where no bare kids glitter like lead
next to a compound well, no bottles hiss, tops tinkling down under the table planks, no tumblers lift, no lips purse into “Bis-
simillahi!” here also to give thanks!
“Life’s but a wayside farm,” no singer sings or looks up from the dust towards the ranks
of roofs, and stars, and washing-line strings:
“Life’s but a wayside farm.” No Sunday drunk asleep straight upright in his chair, the wings of his nose tensing, untensing, his chin sunk solemn to his Zaria Rugby Club tie. No Sani, foot caressed in palm, and chunk
of meat in cheek and intent specs from eye to eye across the bottles’ necks: the way Saddam’s been demonised, the way the spy
and torture boys come in from RSA, Israel, the end of the USSR, Third World helpless against the CIA
terrorists, bakers (pause) and bourgeois so-called Marxist expatriates with sly agendas — as you slide another
Star up to his wristwatch and mosquitoes fly electron patterns round his ears with thin high screams . . .

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