Beowulf slays the wizard Seamus Heaney, the Irish Nobel laureate, won the Whitbread book of the year award for the second time last night, when his ancient warrior Beowulf slew the upstart young wizard Harry Potter. It is the fourth year in a row that a poet has won the £22,000 prize. Books Unlimited author page Work online and useful links

The unknown master Bernard O'Donoghue on the man who didn't get the Whitbread prize - Beowulf's original author

Looking for glamour at the Whitbread ceremony Pity poor David Cairns, author of the Whitbread Biography Award winner with the second volume of his study of Berlioz. Probably assuming that a nineteenth-century composer wouldn't triumph over a schoolboy wizard or a man-eating monster, he had consoled himself with the thought of meeting the ever more glamorous JK Rowling...

Guardian review: Wizard, but with a touch of Tom Brown In the latest volume Harry and his friends have reached the disorientating middle years of adolescence. The Prisoner of Azkaban is correspondingly darker and more fragmented. Buy it at 50% off

Pass Notes: Harry Potter Why Harry has been seen as the devil incarnate

Passnotes: Whitbread Prize
The lowdown on the awards

Angelic Noise Steven Poole: How refreshing, by the way, to have a Good King as a major character. The crowning virtue of this novel is Tremain's restlessly probing sympathy, so that if no character is of totally unblemished virtue, neither is anyone thoroughly bad: life just has more "teasing complexity" than that. Buy it from BOL

My favourite book of 1999 Rose Tremain: Alone in Siberia, that vast territory that is both Russia's land-of-the-unwanted and its "haven" of "primitive innocence", a place where the sheer size of the forest can send the traveller mad and the permafrost crushes the foundations of buildings, Colin Thubron conducts a long, hungry, sleepless search for past and present truth. His In Siberia bears vivid and poetic witness to the deprivations and confusions of a people who no longer know what their past suffering signified nor where their future was.

Baton charge Max Loppert: The concluding volume of David Cairns's Berlioz biography (the first, subtitled "1803-1832: The Making of an Artist", was published a decade ago) seems, in its breadth and depth, its profound love of and sympathy for the subject, to set a seal on the whole British adoptive process. Buy it from BOL

Requiem for a genius George Steiner: Hector Berlioz is his own pre-eminent biographer. Endowed with a style at once caustic and passionate, lyric and ironic, Berlioz's Memoires , his voluminous correspondence, his musical journalism, so vividly expressive of his moods and concerns, constitute a matchless self-portrayal. Wisely, David Cairns, in this second volume of his monumental biography, lets Berlioz speak for himself. Long stretches of it paraphrase or cite directly from the master's own writings. This narrative is, truly, a labour of love.

Frankie's class act James Hopkin: Literature for the lads has never been in such rude and raucous health, and the honest guv confessional, dedicated to promoting the sensitivities of ordinary males, is just one of the many sub-genres to prosper. Tim Lott's first novel, White City Blue, attempts to join the gang. Buy it from BOL

My friends, the enemy Tim Lott: My novel White City Blue could best be described as a tragicomedy about male friendship. It is ? and I reluctantly have to insert, at this point, the word 'therefore' ? simultaneously a book about failure. Failure of communication, failure of honesty, finally failure of love. And when I watch ? or, more accurately, am informed of ? the level of intimacy that women appear to be capable of generating with each other, I feel men have some catching up to do.

Model judge joins literary panel December 8: Jerry Hall, the Texan model whose relationship with the wayward, ever Rolling Stone, Mick Jagger is itself the stuff of fiction, is to judge one of the country's top literary awards.

Whitbread judge Sarah Anderson on the selection process

Heaney favourite for top Whitbread prize
6 January: Nobel winner who pipped his friend Ted Hughes in the poetry category with his reworking of Beowulf is in line for the Book of the Year award

Hughes in line for third award November 10: Death is no obstacle to the restless ghost of Ted Hughes. The former poet laureate won the Whitbread prize from beyond the grave for Birthday Letters and now - a year on - the small matter of his demise has not stopped him being nominated yet again for the awards.

Quivering Review of Jim Crace's mesmerising tale of love and decomposition, Being Dead Buy it at 10% off

The serious joker
Profile of the versatile comic novelist, columnist, playwright and translator Michael Frayn, author of Headlong
Buy it at 20% off

Break in transmission
Interview with the former Newsnight presenter and author of A Foreign Country, Francine Stock
Buy A Foreign Country at 10% off

I wish I'd written . . .
Andrew O'Hagan, author of Our Fathers, on John McGahern's first novel The Barracks
Buy Our Fathers at 10% off

Don's delight
Robert Potts reviews The Eyes by Don Paterson

Why I share Marilyn's shame
Autodidact and author of The Eyes Don Paterson on beginner's guides to everything

A child of acrimony
Approximately Nowhere by Michael Hofmann takes anger and turns it into elegy
Buy it at 10% off

Yarn spinner
Review of Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Bruce Chatwin
Buy it at 30% off

Metre maid How Carol Ann Duffy, author of Meeting Midnight, got happy Buy Meeting Midnight at 10% off

Mum is the word Jacqueline Wilson's The Illustrated Mum has all the qualities of her previous successes - the observant first-person child narrative; the resourceful heroines; the fragile family structure; the importance of hope; and the difficulties of children who have to manage their own lives Buy it at 30% off