The University of Edinburgh has announced the winners of this year’s James Tait Black Prizes, one of the UK’s oldest literary awards, first established in 1919.
Shady Lewis’s On the Greenwich Line, translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls and published by Peirene Press, has taken the fiction prize.
The novel follows an Egyptian-born housing officer dealing with the lives of migrants and refugees in East London and has been praised for its dark humour and sharp portrayal of bureaucracy and displacement.
The biography prize went to The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henri Christophe by Marlene L. Daut, published by Yale University Press.
The book tells the story of a formerly enslaved man who rose to become the only king in Haitian history, examining his role in securing independence and his vision of building a sovereign Black nation after colonial rule.
The winners were selected from a record haul of more than 500 submissions, with five titles shortlisted in each category. Each winner receives £10,000.
Professor Alex Thomson, Head of the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, said: “This year’s James Tait Black Prize winners demonstrate the remarkable power of literature to illuminate lives, histories and communities that are often overlooked.
“On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis, translated by Katharine Halls, is a deeply humane and sharply observed novel about migration and belonging in contemporary Britain, while The First and Last King of Haiti by Marlene L. Daut offers a powerful re-examination of Haiti’s revolutionary history through the life of Henry Christophe.
“Together, these works reflect the ambition, originality and global perspective that the prizes have celebrated for more than a century.”
The prizes are the only major British book awards judged by literature scholars and students, with academics and undergraduates from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures making the final decisions each year.
Lewis is an Egyptian novelist and journalist based in London, where he has worked for the NHS and local authority housing departments.
Halls, a Cardiff-born Arabic-to-English translator, previously received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for her translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence.
Daut is a Professor of French and Black Studies at Yale University and has written for the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar and the LA Review of Books.
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