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Lucy Ellmann lands James Tait Black prize, 38 years after her father's win

The mostly single-sentence novel Ducks, Newburyport scoops £10,000 award for its piercing portrait of Trump’s America

Published: 21 Aug 2020

The Guardian view on arts prizes: a 20th-century phenomenon?

Editorial: This year’s Booker and Turner prizes tell us artists and even judges are repudiating the winner-takes-all award. It may be time to find new ways to celebrate the arts

Published: 15 Dec 2019

Olivia Laing splits James Tait Black prize win with fellow shortlistees

In Crudo, her winning novel, Laing explained she had ‘said that competition has no place in art and I meant it’

Published: 19 Aug 2019

Eimear McBride wins James Tait Black prize for The Lesser Bohemians

The Irish novelist’s ‘astonishing’ novel about the sexual awakening of a teenager with an older actor lands the UK’s oldest literary award

Published: 14 Aug 2017

James Tait Black awards, UK's oldest book prizes, reveal 2016 winners

James Shapiro’s 1606, a detailed biography of a year in Shakespeare’s life, and Benjamin Markovits’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This both receive £10,000

Published: 15 Aug 2016

Shakespeare biography leads James Tait Black prize shortlist

James Shapiro’s 1606 gets nod for venerable honour alongside books by David Hare, Ruth Scurr and Sarah Knights

Published: 21 Apr 2016

James Tait Black prize goes to Zia Haider Rahman's debut novel

In the Light of What We Know takes £10,000 award for story encompassing issues from war in Afghanistan to the banking crisis

Published: 17 Aug 2015

Angela Carter named best ever winner of James Tait Black award

The James Tait Black award chooses 1984 novel Nights at the Circus from nearly a century's worth of great names

Published: 6 Dec 2012

Fiona MacCarthy and Padgett Powell win James Tait Black prizes

Experimental novelist and biographer honoured at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

Published: 25 Aug 2012

AS Byatt says women who write intellectual books seen as unnatural

Grande dame of literature AS Byatt criticises Orange prize for fiction saying there is no such thing as feminine subject matter

Published: 20 Aug 2010

Michael Holroyd wins James Tait Black prize 42 years after his wife

A Strange Eventful History wins award for biographer, more than four decades after spouse Margaret Drabble took the fiction honour

Published: 21 Aug 2009

Shortlists announced for James Tait Black Memorial prizes

Biographers and novelists contend for the UK's oldest book prizes

Published: 14 May 2009

Contenders line up for UK's oldest book prize

Mohsin Hamid and John Burnside are among authors shortlisted for the 2008 James Tait Black Memorial prizes

Published: 28 Apr 2008

Cormac McCarthy bestseller wins James Tait Black

The American author Cormac McCarthy, long revered for the hardbitten poetry of his novels, has won the UK's oldest and most literary of book awards.

Published: 28 Aug 2007

Literary world applauds Rushdie knighthood

Salman Rushdie has amassed for himself a fair number of distinctions over the years, among them the Booker of Bookers prize, the Whitbread novel award (twice), the James Tait Black memorial prize, and a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini calling for his immediate assassination.

Published: 16 Jun 2007

A prize, at last, for McEwan novel

They gave Zadie Smith her first literary prize six years ago, but they are much older than that. In 1920 they helped DH Lawrence out in hard times. And yesterday the £10,000 James Tait Black memorial prizes did another unconventional thing. They picked as novel of the year Ian McEwan's Saturday.

Published: 8 Jun 2006
McEwan's Saturday wins UK's oldest literary prize

Ian McEwan's tale of a London neurosurgeon and his family, set on the day of the anti-Iraq war protest, has been awarded the James Tait Black Memorial prize, worth £10,000.

Published: 7 Jun 2006

Ali Smith hits the shortlists again

Ali Smith's The Accidental continues to impress awards panels, today making the shortlist of the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial prize along with Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Published: 2 May 2006

About 21 results for James Tait Black memorial prize

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