A graphic work has been named as the winner of the biography section in the 2012 Costa book awards – a first for the prestigious literary prize that also reached another significant milestone when women swept the board in the five categories.

Mary Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, which was illustrated by her husband Bryan, a veteran of the comic genre, won biography of the year while Hilary Mantel won the novel award for Bring Up the Bodies; Francesca Segal won first novel for The Innocents; Kathleen Jamie's The Overhaul came first in poetry, and Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon was named children's book of the year.

"It's wonderful," said Talbot on hearing that a woman won in every category. "It just shows how much female talent there is out there."

She and her husband won the £5,000 biography prize for a book that interweaves the true and tragic story of James Joyce's daughter Lucia with the author's own troubled relationship with her father, the eminent Joycean scholar James S Atherton.

The Talbots have known of the win for several weeks. "It has been really hard keeping quiet about it," said Mary. "We were astonished. Just being shortlisted was amazing and hearing we'd won the category was stunning. We're delighted of course, both personally – it's the first story I've had published – but also for the medium, I can't believe a graphic novel has won."

It is not the first graphic work to win a major literary prize – Art Spiegelman's Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992 and Chris Ware won the Guardian first book prize in 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth – but the Costa award is still a significant moment for the graphic medium.

"It is a good thing for graphic novels as a whole," said Bryan Talbot whose prodigious output includes The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alice in Sunderland as well as strips for Judge Dredd and Batman. "Graphic novels are becoming increasingly accepted as a legitimate art form."

The last graphic novel spike came about 25 years ago with the popularity of books such as The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and Maus. The problem then, said Talbot, was that there were not enough books to feed this. "By the time you'd read a dozen or so of the best titles, there wasn't enough left to keep this nascent interest going. Since then, there has been an increasing number of graphic novels published and now we have this whole canon of quality work.

"We are living in the golden age of graphic novels. There are more and better comics being drawn today than ever in the history of the medium and there's such a range of styles of artwork, of genre and of subject matter."

Judges called Dotter of Her Father's Eyes "a beautifully crafted" work "which crosses the boundaries between literature and the graphic genre with extraordinary effect".

The Talbots' book was not the only graphic work to feature in this year's Costas. Joff Winterhart had been nominated in the novel section for Days of the Bagnold Summer but he missed out to Mantel who became the first author to win the Man Booker prize and the Costa novel prize in the same year. Her book, Bring Up the Bodies, the second instalment of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, won from a shortlist that included novels by James Meek and Stephen May.

The children's book section was won by Gardner for Maggot Moon, which has as its hero a 15-year-old dyslexic boy written off by his teachers and bullied by schoolmates. Gardner admitted bursting into tears on the number 73 bus when she heard of her win. "I felt such a muppet but it was amazing – I just couldn't believe it."

Maggot Moon is very much informed by Gardner's own dyslexia and childhood when she was expelled from one school and branded unteachable at another. She speaks passionately about how dyslexia should not be seen as a problem: "It is not to do with spelling, it is to do with differences. If we are educated differently, more imaginatively, more out of the box there would be less failures."

The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie won her category for poems described by judges as "the collection that will convert you to poetry". The Overhaul is Jamie's first collection since she won the Forward Prize in 2004 for The Tree House.

Segal, a journalist who for three years wrote the Observer's debut fiction series, won the first novel prize for a work inspired by Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, relocating it to modern day Hampstead.

Each category winner takes away £5,000 – as well as an inevitable increase in sales – and competes again for the overall Costa book of the year which will be announced on 29 January and is decided by a judging panel chaired by Jenni Murray from BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. Bookmakers William Hill have named Mantel favourite at 5/4 followed by Segal (3/1); the Talbots (4/1); Jamie (5/1) and Gardner (7/1).

If Mantel does win, it will continue the novel's success in the Costa book awards. Since the book of the year prize was introduced in 1985, it has been won 10 times by a novel, four times by a first novel, five times by a biography, seven times by a collection of poetry and once by a children's book.