The mother of all literary awards

"It’s always next to impossible making a final choice," says Edinburgh University's Professor Colin Nicholson of the James Tait Black Memorial prizes, which he is charged with judging, "partly because our incredible back-list of winners hangs over your shoulder like angels of destiny charged with quality control."

This Friday sees the 90th anniversary of Britain’s oldest literary awards. Prizes of £10,000 will be awarded by the University of Edinburgh to the two writers deemed to have written the best work of fiction and the best biography published in 2008. The victors will join Nicholson's "angels of destiny" - the distinguished list of past winners that reads like a hall of fame of modern fiction, stretching from D.H. Lawrence to J.G. Ballard.

The awards were established in 1919 by Janet Coats to commemorate her late husband, publisher James Tait Black, and his love of good books. Since then the University of Edinburgh has managed the awards – unique among major book awards for being judged exclusively by students and academics.

A team of postgraduate readers from the English Literature Department do the drudge-work, ploughing their way through all possible contenders, with the shortlist and eventual winner decided by a senior member of staff within the department. This academic élite is aided by an advisory committee which includes Ian Rankin, broadcaster James Naughtie and the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Catherine Lockerbie.

Professor Nicholson, who also manages the awards, praises the “remarkable variety” of this year’s shortlists, confessing that “we’d never get to this stage in the process without the careful winnowing-out of lesser performances by our postgraduate teams of readers."

This method has proved remarkably prescient: the committee award has recognised four Noble Prize winners early in their careers, with Sir William Golding, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee receiving the fiction award and Doris Lessing taking the biography prize in 1994, 13 years before winning the Nobel.

Happily, Professor Nicholson believes that “this year's 90th anniversary shortlist certainly lives up to the high standards expected of the James Tait Black awards and it maintains the range of past contenders”. Indeed, one of this year's nominees is already a Nobel laureate – Toni Morrison has made the final five with her novel, A Mercy. She is joined by Sebastian Barry, Andrew Crumey (the Scot is also a noted physicist), and English novelist Adam Mars-Jones. Completing the shortlist is Mohammed Hanif, a Pakistani Air Force pilot turned head of the BBC’s Urdu Service.

The shortlisted biographies include an account of Arthur Miller until 1962 by Christopher Bigsby; Jackie Wullschlager’s book on modernist painter Marc Chagall; Sheila Rowbotham’s Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love; Michael Holroyd’s A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families, and Gerald Martin’s biography of Gabriel García Márquez that has taken a dedicated 18 years to write.

Thanks to the unbiased and expert-led structure of these awards, the university has held true to the simple premise on which the prizes were founded: a love of good books. “All of these books are prize-worthy”, concludes Professor Nicholson. “We’ll find out on Friday.”