Cormac McCarthy wins James Tait Black Prize

James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh for the best work of fiction and the best biography published during the previous year. The winner for the best work of fiction is Cormac McCarthy for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road. The journalist and author Byron Rogers was awarded the prize for the best biography for his book The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas. The awards were announced on Saturday, August 25 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Winners are awarded a prize of £10,000.

As always, the shortlist is impressive and filled with authors you may have read before:

Novel Shortlist:

The View from Castle Rock - Alice Munro

The Night Watch - Sarah Waters

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Seven Lies - James Lasdun

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Electricity - Ray Robinson


Biography Shortlist:

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family And Fatherland - Carmen Callil

Mellon: An American Life - David Cannadine

John Evelyn: Living For Ingenuity - Gillian Darley

George Mackay Brown: The Life - Maggie Fergusson

The Man Who Went into the West: The Life Of R.S.Thomas - Byron Rogers

The High Road to China: George Bogle, The Panchen Lama and the First British Expedition To Tibet - Kate Teltscher


Check the Library catalog to locate these titles. For those that we do not own currently, we will be ordering so look in the the catalog to check on the ordering status of these titles.