Holroyd's Magic Carpet

Sebastian Barry has won a second major prize for The Secret Scripture, carrying off the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction (Britain's oldest literary award) last night.

The award for biographer, meanwhile, went to Michael Holroyd, who has won it more than four decades after his wife Margaret Drabble won for fiction with Jerusalem the Golden! His book A Strange Eventful History, is about 19th-century Shakespearean actors, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving and their families. It was written over a period of seven years, while Holroyd was suffering from bowel cancer. He says :

Whenever I could escape from the sick room, I used to immerse myself in another world, of actors in the Edwardian age ... I hoped that need to get away from sickness and enter another world would give the writing an additional intensity. It was a magic carpet, and I was the time traveller.

You can read reviews of the book at The Washington Post and The Independent.

'Horses' Takes James Tait Black Prize

The results of the world's oldest book award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes have been announced [via]. Rosalind Belben's Our Horses in Egypt won the fiction prize.

This from the website :

Two stories intertwine in Belben’s finely written novel – that of Philomena, a horse serving in Egypt and Palestine during the First World War, and Griselda, her daughter Amabel and Nanny, the original owners of the horse before her requisition, who travel across Egypt to find her. That Philomena’s stoicism and duty is as apparent as her owners is testament to Belben’s ability to give life and language to animals as well as humans. She does this without any sense of strain or anthropomorphism, through a rich and innovative use of language that never slips into the sentimental. An innovatively plotted and convincingly executed novel.

The novel is reviewed by dovegreyreader, and by Jane Shilling in the Telegraph.

The biography prize went to Rosemary Hill for God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, which took the author 15 years to write

Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-1852) — think Big Ben, think the spire of the ‘Hub’ near the top of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh — was an eccentric but influential designer of everything from cathedrals to plant-pots who paved the way for High Victorian Gothic and sowed the seeds of the later Arts and Crafts movement. He also led a personal life of colourful complexity (and sad brevity) at the centre of the mid-century ‘English Catholic’ revival. Rosemary Hill’s very full and readable biography does justice to all the facets of the man and his work, and relates them outward to a fast-changing world beyond.

Professor Colin Nicholson, of the University of Edinburgh and one of the judges, praised the two books for their readability, although he said (most diplomatically) that all the shortlisted titles would have been worthy of the prize.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are awarded to one work of fiction and one work of biography each year.

Shortlists Catchup

I'm not doing a great job of keeping up with the shortlists and longlists of recent literary prizes so here's a catch up with links so that you can go read more if so inclined.

The shortlists for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Britian's oldest literary award and the only one to be awarded by scholars and graduate students of literature) look like this :

Fiction :

• Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben
• The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
• A Far Country by Daniel Mason
• Salvage by Gee Williams

Biography :

• Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell by Michael Gray
• God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain by Rosemary Hill
• Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
• Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
• John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves

The winner will be announced in August, and you can find out more on the Guardian website.

On the other side of the globe, the shortlist for the Miles Franklin, Australia's most prestigious literary award :

• The Fern Tattoo David Brooks
• The Time We Have Taken Steven Carroll
• Love without Hope Rodney Hall
• Sorry Gail Jones
• Landscape of Farewell Alex Miller

As The Age points out, there's a great deal of familiarity about the names on the list (authors pictured below) - Brooks is the only first time contender, while Carroll hopes that it will be third time lucky for him!

The winner will be announced on the 19th June.

Maths and Apes on the Beach

Another novel recently read was William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach. One of the TBR books I've pledged to read this year, it's been sitting on my shelves since I bought this copy, second-hand from Skoob a couple of years ago. The novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1991.

It's the first William Boyd I've read, I'm ashamed to say, and I wonder just why it took me so long because it's such an intelligent, well-written novel that now I want to plunge into the others.

Hope Clearwater lives alone in a small beach house of Brazzaville Beach in an unnamed African country. (There actually is a Brazzaville Beach in the republic of Congo though!). She looks back on the cataclysmic events which have changed the course of her life, and throughout the book two stories run parallel, at times echoing each other.

She recalls her relationship and marriage to a brilliant but psychologically unstable mathematician genius. At the same time describes how she came to Africa to participate in a primate research project at The Grosso Arvore Research Center (there are echoes of Jane Goodall's work here) and finds herself uncovering an unnerving truth about the nature of chimpanzees (and by extension perhaps, about mankind's predisposition towards violence). Her discoveries have far reaching consequences and she finds herself pitched against her employer and mentor who refuses to accept her findings.

Boyd is particularly good here at pointing out the dangers of narrowly focused dogmatic belief and academic obsession. I enjoyed the way Hope refers to the mathematical principles she's learned from her husband, John, and tries to draw a philosophy from them to illuminate the seeming chaos of her own life.

The characters, human and ape, were all well-drawn. Here's a male author convincingly able to inhabit a female skin - I felt a lot for Hope. (And I like to imagine for her the happy ending that isn't quite reached in the book.) I also felt deeply for the manic-depressive John Clearwater who fails to fulfill his dream of great Mathematical discovery and suffers terribly because of it.

This book has one of the best first sentences ever:

I never really warmed to Clovis-he was far too stupid to inspire real affection-but he always claimed a corner of my heart, largely, I supposed, because of the way he instinctively and unconsciously cupped his genitals whenever he was alarmed or nervous.

And if that's whetted your appetite, you can also take a gander at the opening pages on amazon.com.

Blanche d'Alpuget's 1991 New York Times review is here, while Robin Mokie in New Scientist takes a look at how research scientists are portrayed!

Because, while anyone who loves a well-written thought provoking novel will enjoy this book, it will appeal particularly to those of you with a love and understanding of maths and science. (Sham? Machinist? Greenbottle? Burhan?)

James Tait Black Shortlists

The shortlists for the James Tait Black, Britain's oldest literary award have been announced. The contenders for the fiction prize are:

• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Seven Lies by James Lasdun
• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Electricity by Ray Robinson

There are some very strong contenders: Orange winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as Pulitzer winner Cormac McCarthy and Booker shortlisted Sarah Walters.

But the shortlist also spotlights other excellent works which have slipped a little more below the radar (well my radar at least!): The View from Castle Rock is a collection of stories by Canadian author Alice Munro: in the first part of the book they are based on material Munro uncovered when researching her own family history in Scotland, and in the second, they are based on more autobiographical material. (I've much enjoyed some of Munro's earlier stories - she has to be one of the best short-fiction writers alive.)

Dina will be very happy to see her friend and former coursemate Ray Robinson, on the list! (The only debut novelist on it.) Electricity, written as part of his PhD in creative writing features a protagonist who is epileptic but refuses the label. (On the Lancaster University website, Robinson describes his research and talks about working on his writing in an academic environment.)

Seven Lies is James Lasdun's second novel, and is a thriller set in Berlin and New York. The blurb on the award website describes it as:

... a page-turning study of betrayal, guilt and shame with just enough allegory about it to keep America’s National Security State in unsettling focus.

(I can see my friend Kaykay getting all excited about this one!)

You can read more about all the shortlisted fiction, as well as the books listed for the The James Tait Black award for biography here, and in the Guardian.

Another Shot

If you don't win one literary prize, hopefully you get a shot at another! I'm happy for Ian McEwan whose Saturday has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize after losing out so badly in the Booker stakes.

And while Sarah Walters lost out to Zadie Smith in the Orange stakes, I'm sure we'll be seeing The Night Watch on the list for other awards later in the year. (It will eligible because it was only published this year, unlike the other Orange shortlisted books.) It is that good, believe me. John Ezard in the Guardian reckons it has a "formidable chance" of taking the Booker or the Whitbread.

I'd have hated to be a judge for either the Orange or the Booker with so many strong titles to choose from. And I am still perplexed by Robert McCrum's article on the novel losing its way. I am one happy reader and will let you know if that changes.

Related Posts

His Saturday - My Sunday (4/9/05)
The James Tait Black Shortlist Announced (3/5/06)

James Tait Black Shortlist Announced

Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are Scotland's most prestigious, and the U.K.'s oldest, literary awards and reward excellence biography and fiction. The books are selected by staff and students of Edinburgh University. The 2006 shortlists were released on 30th May and the winners will announced in June.

Here's the fiction list:

• Praying Mantis Andre Brink
• Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro
• Beasts of No Nation Uzodinma Iweala
• Saturday Ian McEwan,
• Mother, Missing Joyce Carol Oates
• The Accidental Ali Smith

You can read about all these titles and check out past years' winners at the Award Annals website.