A biography that explores a year of William Shakespeare’s life and a novel that charts an experiment in modern-day Detroit have won Britain’s oldest literary awards.
James Shapiro and Benjamin Markovits have won this year's James Tait Black Prizes, prestigious prizes which are awarded annually by The University of Edinburgh.
The winners of the £10,000 prizes were announced by broadcaster Sally Magnusson at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
The winner of the biography prize, 1606, William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro, portrays how the events of 1606 shaped Shakespeare’s writing in the year of King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
James Shapiro is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
The winning book is a sequel to 1599, which followed another eventful year in the life of the playwright and poet.
The winning book in the fiction prize, You Don’t Have to Live Like This is set primarily in Detroit around the time of the financial crash and President Barack Obama’s election, in 2008.
It is the sixth novel by Benjamin Markovits, who was a professional basketball player before becoming a writer.
The author, journalist and critic who grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin, teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
For the James Tait Black Prizes, more than 400 novels are read by academics and postgraduate students from the University of Edinburgh who nominate books for the shortlist.
Two prizes are awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures for books published during the previous year – one for the best work of fiction and the other for the best biography.
Dr Jonathan Wild, of the University of Edinburgh, said of the winning biography: “Shapiro quite brilliantly interweaves the material found in the 1606 plays with the historical events of this momentous year, allowing us in the process new perspectives on familiar material. He is particularly deft in the ways that he writes about often arcane detail for a non-specialist readership."
Dr Alex Lawrie, of the University of Edinburgh, said of the winning novel: “'In this astonishing state-of-the-nation novel, Markovits deftly captures the racial and economic fault lines at the heart of a supposedly utopian experiment for urban renewal in 21st-century Detroit. You Don't Have To Live Like This forces us to re-examine our own prejudices and advantages, and the impact these have on our willingness to behave in an ethical and socially responsible manner."
The James Tait Black Awards were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats, the widow of publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her husband’s love of good books.
This year’s authors join the list of fiction winners which includes Angela Carter, Graham Greene, DH Lawrence, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh.
In 2013 the prize was extended to include a new category for drama, which will be announced next week.
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