James Tait Black Prize winners revealed for 2024

Authors Alexis Wright, Iman Mersal, and Ian Penman, as well as translator Robin Moger, have won the James Tait Black Prizes for biography and fiction. The awards are judged by literature scholars and students, and have been presented by the University of Edinburgh since 1919.

The £10,000 biography prize has been awarded jointly to Mersal, for Traces of Enayat, translated by Moger (And Other Stories), and Penman, for Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors (Fitzcarraldo Editions). It is the first time that the biography prize has been jointly awarded, and that a writer and translator have been awarded the prize together. The cash prize has been split between the authors and translator of the two books.

Biography judge Dr Simon Cooke, of the University of Edinburgh, called Traces of Enayat “an absorbing work of recovery and appreciation", praising the book for being "formally inventive" and "deeply moving in its evocation of Enayat al-Zayyat’s life". Meanwhile, he commended Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors for being “an extraordinary, signal achievement in the art of life-writing".

Wright won the £10,000 fiction prize for Praiseworthy (And Other Stories) — a novel exploring the climate crisis. Fiction judge Dr Benjamin Bateman of the University of Edinburgh called it “a kaleidoscopic and brilliantly conceived novel that interweaves matters of climate and Indigenous justice in prose".