James Tait Black Prize
Best Novel
1972 A Guest of Honour by Nadine Gordimer
Larger in scope than her earlier work, this long novel is set against the minutely observed background of an unnamed, newly independent African country. The hero, a white liberal named James Bray, returns from exile and is disillusioned by the corruption and greed of the postcolonial government; when he speaks out, he is killed. The novel is often documentary-like with its inclusion of speeches, political statements, and debates about socialism vs. capitalism. It won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
1973 G. by John Berger
John Berger's 1972 erotic novel tells the story of an adventurous young man, his tumultuous life, and especially his many-faceted romantic adventures, in the midst of the chaos of early 20th-century Italy. Berger won the Booker Prize for this novel, and stirred up controversy when he used his acceptance speech to denounce the Booker organization for their historical colonialism in the West Indies and donated one-half his prize money to the Black Panthers. It was after this event that Berger moved permanently from his native England to the French Alps, where he has lived ever since in a peasant village, writing and farming.
1974 Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
In Murdoch's 15th novel, an aging novelist who has led a loveless life retires even further from the real world to write his magnum opus. Instead, he falls obsessively in love with a very young woman. The portrait of the artist is not only a gripping story of human relationships, but a profound consideration of love, death, and art.
1975 The Great Victorian Collection by Brian Moore
An accumulation of Victorian artifacts, literally dreamed up by young, obscure historian Anthony Maloney has crucial effects on his private and public lives as it draws him nearer and nearer to the border between creative nightmare and deadly wakefulness.
1976 Doctor Copernicus by John Banville
This depiction of the lonely childhood and star-obsessed career of the astronomer Copernicus is full of quotes from writers, scientists, and philosophers from many eras, including Einstein, Yeats, and Kierkegaard. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1984.
1977 Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carre
Master spy George Smiley searches for the enigmatic Soviet operative named Karla.
1979 Darkness Visible by William Golding
A young boy named Matty is rescued from a horrible fire during the London blitz and is permanently mutilated. He grows up to be a religious visionary. As in all Golding's works, the force for good is balanced by a force for evil, in this case a pair of twins who have been seduced by the attractions of darkness. The novel's title comes from Milton's description of Hell in "Paradise Lost." This harsh novel is reportedly the only one of Golding's works that he did not like to talk about.
1980 Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
The confessions of a magistrate in a colonial outpost who is ordered to collaborate with brutal torturers. At first he agrees, then rebels, and must pay the price for his refusal.
1981 The Mosquito Coast by Paul Therous
The 13-year-old son of a fanatical father tells the story of his family's journey from the New England suburbs to the Honduran jungle. Abominating what he sees as the decadence and horror of the 20th century, Allie Fox abandons civilization, keeping his family intact by sheer force of will and his tortured, quixotic genius, as they move inexorably through a diseased and dirty Eden towards darkness and terror. THE MOSQUITO COAST was an American Book Award nominee in 1982.
1982 On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
A chronicle of the odd and compelling lives of a pair of elderly, inseparable identical twins, Lewis and Benjamin Jones, who are sheep-farmers in rural Wales.
1984 Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
Sophia Fevvers is a circus aerialist--part woman, part swan. An American journalist, who sets out to discover her true identity, falls in love with her and joins the circus on a tour to Russia.
1986 Persephone by Jenny Joseph1988 A Season in the West by Piers Paul Read
A torrid, adulterous affair between Czechoslovakian dissident Josef Birek and Laura Morton, the English translator of his poems, continues when Birek defects to England and assumes an identity as a very close friend of the family.
1989 A Disaffection by James Kelman
Patrick Doyle, a Glasgow schoolteacher drowning in despair, can no longer control his students or his life and retreats into the world of corrugated cardboard pipes--a musical sanctuary of his own invention.
1990 Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd
Brazzaville Beach is in Africa, and a young Englishwoman has taken refuge there to escape her marriage and her career. Winner of the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
1992 Sacred Country by Rose Tremain
Mary Ward realizes at the age of six that she is not a girl but a boy. The story that follows chronicles her attempt to turn this insight into a reality.
1993 Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips
In desperate financial straights, a father sells his three children into slavery. Using a range of voices and experimental narrative techniques, Phillips follows the scattered children across continents and through time to wherever their lives lead them: the hold of a slave ship, an African mission, Colorado, and an English village during the war.
1994 Pink and Say by Patricia Polacco
A story about friendship, slavery, family and courage, set in the American Civil War.
1995 The Prestige by Christopher Priest
A bitter feud between two prestidigitators at the dawn of the 20th century sets the stage for this World Fantasy Award-winning novel. After rising stage magician Alfred Borden exposes magician/spiritualist Rupert Angier's trickery during a séance, a fierce and ugly rivalry springs up between the two, with each seeking to expose and copy the other's illusions in the most public and embarrassing manner possible. But Angier simply cannot penetrate the secret to Borden's most spectacular illusion, the New Transported Man, in which Borden seems to instantaneously disappear from one location and reappear in another. In response, Angier designs his own version of the trick, based on a separate secret whose sinister implications will reach into the present day and affect the descendants of each man.
1998 Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge
George Hardy is a successful Liverpool surgeon and an amateur photographer. He is also, secretly, an alcoholic and a homosexual. The facts of his life are narrated by the people in his life: Myrtle, an orphan girl who devotes her life to him, even surreptitiously bearing his children (his wife is barren); his brother-in-law Dr. Potter, a geologist and classical scholar; and Pompey Jones, a street-urchin and fire-eater as well as Master Georgie's assistant and lover. The Crimean War is the background to this melancholy novel, which is about the essential aloneness of all human beings. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.
Biography
1979 Christopher Isherwood by Brian Finney
A detailed study of Isherwood's fiction shows how the author made use of his own experiences to create his novels.
1981 Edith Sitwell, a Unicorn Among Lions by Victoria Glendinning
Presents a detailed biography of Dame Edith Sitwell, the iconoclastic and complex English poet, discussing the life and literary career of an eccentric and contradictory woman.
1982 James Joyce by Richard Ellmann
This masterly biography has long been called definitive--a vast labor of insight and intelligence that is widely seen as a model of its kind. In Ellmann's hands, Joyce's life reads like a fascinating novel of a quirky, complex, and ultimately appealing man and writer.
1983 Franz Liszt by Alan Walker1984 Virginia Woolf by Lyndall Gordon
1988 Wittgenstein by Brian McGuinness
Traces the early years of the philosopher, detailing the roles that his troubled family, his imposing and wealthy father, turn-of-the-century Viennese intellectuals, and his World War I experiences played in the formation of his philosophy.
1990 The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin
A portrait of nineteenth-century actress Ellen Ternan, the woman who was the mistress of Charles Dickens, describing her secret relationship with the author.
1991 Darwin by Adrian Desmond, James Moore
In lively and accessible style, the authors tell how Darwin came to his world-changing conclusions and how he kept his thoughts secret for twenty years. Hailed as the definitive biography, this book explains Darwin's paradox and offers a window on Victorian science, theology, and mores. Contains a wealth of new information and 90 photographs.
1992 The Reckoning by Charles Nicholl
A nonfiction account of the death of Christopher Marlowe.
1993 Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage by Richard Holmes
A critically acclaimed biographer reconstructs the unusual friendship of eighteenth-century poet, playwright, and convicted murderer Richard Savage with a young, unknown, provincial schoolmaster, Samuel Johnson.
1994 Under My Skin by Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing offers her autobiography up to the year 1949, from her childhood and adolescence in Rhodesia, to her first marriage and abandonment of her two children, her jettisoning of religion and adopting of political activism. Though autobiographical elements have always found a way into her fiction, here are the facts themselves.