Ridgway, Chaudhuri win James Tait Black prizes

Tuesday, 30 August 2022 Books+Publishing

In the UK, Keith Ridgway and Amit Chaudhuri have won the James Tait Black prizes for fiction and biography respectively.

Ridgway won the fiction prize for A Shock (Picador), a collection of overlapping vignettes following several different characters living in South London. Fiction judge Benjamin Bateman called A Shock ‘a sensitive, creative, and highly humane examination of lives that, in so much other fiction, would be relegated to the status of minor characters’.

Chaudhuri won the biography prize for Finding the Raga: An improvisation on Indian music (Faber), an exploration of the author’s relationship with North Indian classical music. Biography judge Simon Cooke said Finding the Raga is ‘a work of great depth, subtlety, and resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we thought about music, place, and creativity’.

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. Each winning author receives £10,000 (A$16,970).

The winners of last year’s prizes were Shola Von Reinhold and Doireann Ní Ghríofa for fiction and biography respectively.