Wright wins 2024 James Tait Black fiction prize
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (Giramondo) has won the fiction award in the 2024 James Tait Black Prizes. Wright’s novel was chosen from a shortlist of four fiction works for the £10,000 (A$18,958) prize.
Fiction judge Benjamin Bateman, of the University of Edinburgh, called Praiseworthy ‘a kaleidoscopic and brilliantly conceived novel that interweaves matters of climate and Indigenous justice in prose that accomplishes the most difficult of feats—being funny and simultaneously ferociously engaged with some of the most pressing ethical and political questions of our contemporary moment’.
Said Wright: ‘I am really pleased that the judges on the fiction panel have acknowledged the innovative nature of Praiseworthy, and appreciated the scope of my intentions with this work. In this work, I wanted to capture the spirit of our times at home and across the world. I intended Praiseworthy to be a big book in more ways than one. I hope its scale and scope is right for the times we live in.’
Presented by the University of Edinburgh since 1919, the James Tait Black prizes are the only major British book awards judged by literature scholars and students. Said Bateman: ‘Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy stood out to our student readers for pushing the novel form in new directions and for depicting, with impeccable nuance and humour, the moral complexity of trying to make a life under conditions of governmental dispossession and slow violence.’
This year’s James Tait Black biography prize, the shortlist for which was increased to six for 2024, was jointly awarded to Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (trans by Robin Moger, And Other Stories) and Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman (Fitzcarraldo Editions).
Traces of Enayat illuminates the life story of author Enayat al-Zayyat, whose only novel, Love and Silence, was published posthumously following her suicide in her early 20s. First published in Arabic in 2019, Traces of Enayat is a memoir of Mersal’s journey through a changing Cairo as she traces her subject’s life story.
Biography judge Simon Cooke called the book ‘an absorbing work of recovery and appreciation: formally inventive and reflective in its fusion of biographical approaches into a form all its own, beautifully attentive to the elusive, and deeply moving in its evocation of Enayat al-Zayyat’s life’.
Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, which also won the 2024 Ondaatje Prize overnight, is ‘an insight into the post–Second World War culture of sex, drugs and rock and roll through the eyes of West German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, according to the University of Edinburgh. Cooke said the panel found Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors to be ‘an extraordinary, signal achievement in the art of life-writing: poetically luminous at every turn, fascinating and agile in form, and hauntingly moving as a portrait’.
Further information on the awards is available on the prize website.
Category: Awards Local news
