Winners of James Tait Black Prizes revealed

THE novelist Padgett Powell and the biographer Fiona MacCarthy were yesterday given the prestigious James Tait Black Prizes, Britain’s oldest literary awards.

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.

American writer Powell, whose work was nominated for an American Book Award and excerpted in the New Yorker, is winner of the fiction prize for his book You And I.

Regarded as one of Britain’s foremost literary biographers, MacCarthy is the recipient of the biography prize for her book on the subject of a celebrated British artist and designer, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones And The Victorian Imagination.

The prizes are for the best work of fiction and the best biography published during the previous 12 months.

The James Tait Black’s roster of former winners includes some of the best writers in 
the literary canon. The past recipients include DH Lawrence, Ian McEwan and Cormac 
McCarthy.

Fiction winner Powell, who is a professor of writing at the University of Florida, saw off competition from authors including Man Booker Prize nominee AD Miller and Scots writer Ali Smith.

MacCarthy’s offering beat Pulitzer Prize winner Manning Marable’s book, Malcolm X: 
A Life Of Reinvention, and Australian author Ian Donaldson’s biography of dramatist Ben Jonson.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats, the widow of publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her deceased husband’s love of reading.

They are the only major British book awards judged 
by scholars and postgraduate literature students.