The James Tait Black Memorial Prize @ EIBF

 

The James Tait Black Memorial Prize is the oldest literary award given in Britain, and host Ian Rankin here was keen to point out the fact that the shortlisting process is assisted by postgraduate students at the University of Edinburgh. It’s actually two prizes, one for fiction, and one for biography, and so the procedure was that one judge would come on stage and discuss the fiction nominees with Ian Rankin, and then another would come to do the same for the biography nominees. As far as this goes, the non-fiction discussion was most entertaining, as it was simply a discussion of the lives of the subjects of the biographies – the best joke was John Cheever being described as ‘a man who got out of bed to rest’. All of this filled time quite pleasantly – certainly better than the year before, when power failed completely – until the announcement of the winners. They were, for fiction: A.S Byatt, for The Children’s Book, and for biography: John Carey, for William Golding: the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies. Both were (conveniently?) in attendance, gave short readings from their books, and went home happy. The audience probably went home in about the same state, in that though it all strangely seemed to lack importance, it was a very pleasant event. [Keir Hind]