Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English Language. One is awarded for fiction and the second for biography.
Major literary figures to receive the award include D. H. Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, John Buchan, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Muriel Spark, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble and Salman Rushdie
Fiction Winner & Shortlisted
Winner: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry - Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mentalhospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval...
Other Shortlisted
A Mercy by Toni Morrison - accept a slave in lieu of payment of a debt from aplantation owner, little Florens' life changes. With her intelligence and passion for wearing the cast-off shoes of her...
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif - Why did a Hercules C130, theworld's sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988? Was it because of: mechanical failure, human error, the CIA's impatience, a blind woman's curse or Generals...
Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones - Growing up disabled and gay in the 1950's, circumstances force John Cromer from an early age to develop an intense and vivid internal world. As his character develops, this ability to transcend external circumstance through his own strength of...
Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey - Robbie Coyle is an imaginative kid. He wants so badly to become Scotland's first cosmonaut that he tries to teach himself Russian and trains for space exploration in the cupboard under the sink. But the place to which hisfantasies later take him...
2009 Biography Winner & Shorlist
Winner: A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families by Michael Holroyd- Henry Irving - a merchant's clerk who became the savior of British theater - and Ellen Terry, who made her first theater appearance as soon as she could walk, were the king and queen of the Victorian stage. This book explores their public and...
Other Shortlisted
Arthur Miller by Christopher Bigsby - Arthur Miller was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over sixty years, writing a wide variety of plays - including The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman - which are still performed, studied and lauded throughout the world.
Chagal: Love and Exile by Jackie Wullschlager- 'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is'. Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbours living in splendour on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, lost love, exile, and the miracle of survival. Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive 'potato-coloured' czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris, living alongside Modigliani and Leger in La Ruche, the artist's colony where 'you either died or came out famous'. Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century.
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Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin - Describes the tension in the author's life between celebrity and literary quality, between politics and writing; and between power, solitude and love; and the contrast between his Caribbean background and the gloomier authoritarianism of highland...
Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham - Challenging both capitalism and the values of Western civilization, the gay socialist writer Edward Carpenter had an extraordinary impact on the cultural and political landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mystic...
2008 Winners
Two writers have joined the ranks of literary giants such as DH Lawrence, EM Forster and Graham Greene by winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes.
Rosalind Belben won the fiction prize for her acclaimed novel, Our Horses in Egypt
Rosemary Hill is the recipient of the biographyprize for her first book, God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain.
(Picador)
(Jonathan Cape)
(Yale University Press)
(Faber)
(Picador)
(Faber)
(Jonathan Cape)
(Fourth
Estate)
(Faber)
(Picador)
(Macmillan)
(Penguin UK)
(Jonathan Cape)
