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James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Subcategory of Awards — International Awards
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History

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, United Kingdom, the prizes were founded in 1919 by Mrs Janet Coats Black in memory of her late husband, James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house of A & C Black Ltd. Prizes are awarded in three categories: Fiction, Biography and Drama.

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 1980

winner y separately published work icon Waiting for the Barbarians J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1980 6303247 1980 single work novel 'How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid? Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them.

After twenty years of peacefully running one of the Empire’s settlements, a magistrate takes pity on an enemy barbarian who has been tortured. He enters into an awkward intimate relationship with her, and then is himself imprisoned as an enemy of the state.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a disturbing political fable about oppression, the fraught desire for reparation, and about living with a troubled conscience under an unjust regime.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 1959

winner y separately published work icon The Devil's Advocate Morris West , 1959 London : Heinemann , 1959 Z528667 1959 single work novel
— Appears in: Reader's Digest Condensed Books: volume four, 1960, Autumn selections 1960;

'A moving exploration of the meaning of faith, and a vivid portrayal of life in impoverished post-war Calabria.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Allen & Unwin, 2017).

Year: 1932

winner y separately published work icon Boomerang Helen Simpson , London : Heinemann , 1932 Z541684 1932 single work novel
VIEW ALL LISTED RECIPIENTS (4)

Works About this Award

Australian Success 1933 single work column
— Appears in: The Australian Women's Weekly , 1 July vol. 1 no. 4 1933; (p. 39)
Australian Novelist Wins James Tait Black Prize 1933 single work column
— Appears in: All About Books , 14 August vol. 5 no. 8 1933; (p. 124)
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (2)
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