Art historian Tanya Harrod and novelist Alan Warner have been awarded Britain's oldest literary awards.
Alan Warner, whose latest novel
is 'The Deadman's Pedal' Photo: Rex
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The acclaimed novelist Alan Warner and the celebrated art historian Tanya
Harrod have received this year’s James Tait Black prizes. They join
an illustrious roster.
Each year, one prize goes to a work of fiction, and the other to a work of
biography. The latter was awarded to Harrod’s ‘The Last Sane Man: Michael
Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture’, while the former went
to Warner’s novel ‘The Deadman’s Pedal’.
The novel was described by Lee Spinks, the prize’s fiction judge, as “an
exceptionally fine novel, richly evocative in detail, beautifully poised in
execution, which in the story of one young man's journey to adulthood through
the mysteries of childhood, sexuality, work, the realities of class society and
the experience of divided family loyalties, offers a compelling poetic vision of
a changing Scotland."
Tanya Harrod’s book won the following praise from the biography judge
Professor Jonathan Wild: "'The Last Sane Man’ offers an exceptional portrait of
a remarkable craftsman and his world. Harrod constructs this biography with the
same eye for form and purpose that marked the work of her subject."
Both authors were picked from weighty shortlists. Alan Warner’s rivals for
the fiction prize were Jenny Fagan (The Panopticon), Kirsty Gunn (The Big Music)
and Ben Lerner (Leaving The Atocha Station). Tanya Harrod’s book was chosen from
a shortlist that featured Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir; Michael
Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of a Modern American
Masterpiece; and Thomas
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