Costa Book Awards: winning women fully deserve their prizes It would be remiss if I did not point out that the biography category winner, Mary Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, is co-written with a man: her husband Bryan Talbot. It tells the story of Mary's upbringing as the daughter of a James Joyce scholar, alongside the life story of Joyce's mentally unstable daughter Lucia. With a title taken from Finnegans Wake and its graphic form, it's a bolder choice than another of the shortlisted titles: Artemis Cooper's Life of explorer Patrick Leigh Fermor. But even if that very different work had won, we would still have an all-female list. Perhaps that tells us something instructive. So varied are the winning works, I doubt the judges even noticed that the authors they have honoured were the same gender. Now that the 2012 Man Booker, Forward and Costas have all gone to women, does the existence of a female-only Orange Prize still make sense? The prize organisers are currently searching for a new sponsor and this year will be privately funded. The ingrained sexism that the founders set the Orange up to tackle seems to have vanished. The Costa List might, however, be an anomaly: as recently as 2011 the Forward Poetry Prize had an all-male shortlist. I should also mention that three of the five Costa winners have male protagonists - evidence, if we needed it, that the authors are pursuing the stories that interest them and do not feel in the slightest inhibited their gender. Neither should their readers. Follow Telegraph Books on Twitter