Amy Arnold and Henry Hoke shortlisted for the £10k James Tait Black Prize for fiction

Novels by Amy Arnold, Henry Hoke, Noel O’Regan and Alexis Wright have been shortlisted for the £10,000 James Tait Black Prize for fiction. Meanwhile, the shortlist for the biography prize, also worth £10,000, has increased to six titles for this year and includes two authors from Fitzcarraldo, Fernanda Melchor and Ian Penman.

The awards have been presented by the University of Edinburgh since 1919, and go to the best work of fiction and biography written in or translated into English published in the previous 12 months. Contenders for this year’s fiction prize include a novel about a woman reflecting on a relationship in the Lake District, and a satirical novel about a mountain lion reflecting on the climate crisis.

Arnold is in the running for the fiction prize with Lori and Joe (Prototype Publishing), and Hoke is on the list with Open Throat (Macmillan). Moreover, O’Regan is shortlisted for Though the Bodies Fall (Granta Books), and Wright is vying for the prize with Praiseworthy (And Other Stories).

“This year we have four strikingly different takes on how memory, both visceral and intellectual, colours the environments through which we move and shapes our understanding of intimates and enemies alike,” said fiction judge Dr Benjamin Bateman, “which is to say, each novel probes, in prose ranging from spare to startling, the ambivalence of living in an increasingly interconnected world.”

In the biography category, the books that are shortlisted for the £10,000 prize feature murderers in the Veracruz area of Mexico, and a snapshot of the post-Second World War culture of “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll”. The biography list has been extended this year to allow the prizes to “pay tribute to a wider range of writings, and to key into the breadth of interests among the postgraduate panellists and wider academic community”.

Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami, translated by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions), and Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat, translated by Robin Moger (And Other Stories), are both on the list. Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman (Fitzcarraldo Editions) is also in the running for the award, alongside Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes (Daunt Books Publishing). The final two titles on this shortlist are Anne Truitt’s Always Reaching (Yale University Press) and Anne Wroe’s Lifescapes (Penguin).   

“From notes to interviews to obituaries to crónicas, this is a kaleidoscopic gathering of astonishing, formally daring life-writings,” commented biography judge Dr Simon Cooke. “Acutely reflective in their inquiries into the stakes of writing lives, these are works as animated by an urgent attentiveness to the textures of loss as by a moving sense of gesture towards the lives evoked in their pages.”

The shortlists will be considered by students and scholars to decide the winners of both the prizes, which will be announced by the University of Edinburgh in May.

The university also offers a free online course with judges and readers, discussing the shortlisted fiction books, as well as classics of English and Scottish fiction. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) — called “How to Read a Novel” — draws on the James Tait Black fiction shortlist and has attracted more than 60,000 participants since launching in 2017.