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Ridgway and Chaudhuri win £10k James Tait Black prizes
Keith Ridgway has won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction with his “sensitive” novel A Shock (Picador) while Amit Chaudhuri has taken the biography award for his “beautifully voiced” work Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music (Faber).
The winners of the £10,000 prizes were announced by author and broadcaster Sally Magnusson at an Edinburgh International Book Festival live event at Edinburgh College of Art.
A Shock follows several different characters living in south London. Over nine overlapping chapters the novel shines a spotlight on their lives and relationships. Fiction judge Benjamin Bateman praised the work as “a sensitive, creative and highly humane examination of lives that, in so much other fiction, would be relegated to the status of minor characters”.
The novel was picked from a shortlist that featured English Magic by Uschi Gatward (Galley Beggar Press), Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (Serpent’s Tail) and Memorial by Bryan Washington (Atlantic).
Chaudhuri triumphed in the biography category with his “mesmerising” exploration of his relationship with north Indian classical music. Biography judge Simon Cooke called the book “a work of great depth, subtlety, and resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we thought about music, place and creativity".
He said: "Folding the ethos of the raga into its own form, it is a beautifully voiced, quietly subversive masterpiece in the art of listening to the world.”
It was chosen from a shortlist that included A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib (Allen Lane), In Memory of Memory: A Romance by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale (Fitzcarraldo Editions), and Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury).
The James Tait Black Prizes are for the best works of fiction and biography during the previous 12 months. They are the only major British book awards judged by literature scholars and students. Prizes are awarded by University of Edinburgh’s English Literature department.
