Laing, Hilsum win 2019 James Tait Black Prizes

Tuesday, 20 August 2019 Books+Publishing

The winners of the James Tait Black Prizes for fiction and biography—the UK’s oldest literary awards—have been announced.

Olivia Laing won the £10,000 (A$17,920) prize for fiction for her novel Crudo (Picador), which charts the personal transformation and love affair of a woman during the summer of 2017. When accepting the award, Laing announced she would divide the prize money equally between the shortlisted authors, stating that ‘competition has no place in art’.

Lindsey Hilsum’s In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin (Vintage) won the biography prize, also worth £10,000. Hilsum’s biography chronicles Colvin’s life and career until her 2012 death in Syria.

Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Prizes are awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh and are judged by postgraduate students and senior academics at the university.

The winners of last year’s prizes were Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret (HarperCollins) and Eley Williams’ short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press).