James Tait Black Prize for Warner and Harrod

THE authors of a novel inspired by a seaport in the Highlands and a biography of a renowned potter have won Britain’s oldest literary awards.

Novelist Alan Warner. Picture: Jayne Wright

Novelist Alan Warner and art historian Tanya Harrod have joined the roll call of celebrated writers to win the James Tait Black Prizes.

The winners of the £10,000 prizes, awarded annually by the English Literature department at the University of Edinburgh, were announced by broadcaster Sally Magnusson at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last night.

Oban-born author Alan Warner, who already has a string of prestigious prizes to his name, won the fiction prize for his book The Deadman’s Pedal.

Warner, whose first novel, Morvern Callar, was later adapted into a film starring Samantha Morton, set his adventure in the early 1970s in the Scottish Highlands.

Prize-winning writer Tanya Harrod, co-editor of the Journal of Modern Craft, won the biography prize for her book on the late British studio potter Michael Cardew.

The book, The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture, tells his remarkable story.

Two prizes are awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh for books published during the previous year – one for the best work of fiction and the other for the best biography.

Previous winners include DH Lawrence, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley and Ian McEwan.