The avantgarde literary award that writers covet the most

From violent revolution to pioneering lesbian fiction, the best books can be controversial, writes Dr Alex Lawrie

When Robert Graves was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1935 for two novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, he expressed his gratitude “not only for the money but for the simplicity of the thing – no prize-giving ceremony or other literary embarrassment”.

Now in their 100th year, the James Tait Black awards (one for fiction, the other for biography) are announced with a little more fanfare, at a ceremony during the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August, to which all shortlisted authors are invited.

A few other things have also changed since those first years of the prize. The original bequest from Janet Coats, who established the prizes in 1918, stipulated that “the Professor of English at Edinburgh” should judge the two prizes.

These days we take a rather more democratic approach, with the academic judges relying on the help of postgraduate student readers to sift through the entries. Around two dozen students divide the 500-plus entries between them, and pass on their recommendations to the judges, who select the two shortlists and the eventual winners.

The prize money is also more substantial than it was back in 1919. The original bequest is supplemented by the university, with each of the winners awarded £10,000. We’re continually looking for ways to reward new writing now, too. In 2013, the awards were extended to include a new category for drama, and this year, to mark the 100th anniversary and honour the founder of the prizes, we’re giving out a creative writing prize.

The Janet Coats Black Prize will be awarded to the best short story by a postgraduate student at the

University of Edinburgh. Since 2017 we’ve also been running a MOOC (a “massive open online course”), called “How to Read a Novel”, which is updated each year to draw on the new James Tait Black shortlist, and has so far had close to 30,000 participants from across the globe.

Janet Coats was a family member of the thread manufacturers J & P Coats, and established the prizes in memory of her husband, the publisher James Tait Black. The endowment explains that he was “deeply interested in the best and most educative and elevating works of literature”, and that the prizes should maintain the highest literary standards.

Since the prizes’ inception 100 years ago, the list of winners forms practically a who’s who of literary heavyweights from across the 20th century and beyond: EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and DH Lawrence were among the first winners, back in the early 1920s.

By mid-century, the likes of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Rose Macaulay were joining that list on the fiction side, and Antonia Fraser, Karl Miller and Richard Ellman each won the biography prize in the years that followed. An extraordinary run of successive fiction winners in the early 1970s included Nadine Gordimer, John Berger, Iris Murdoch, and Lawrence Durrell. Since then Salman Rushdie, Caryl Phillips, Zia Haider Rahman and Eimear Mcbride have joined that illustrious list.

Despite being the UK’S longestrunning literary prizes, with an enviable list of winning authors, the James Tait Black doesn’t grab the headlines in the same way as some of the more high-profile prizes south of the Border.

Perhaps this is down to the unflashy way in which we go about