James Tait Black Memorial Prizes 2009 Shortlists

The shortlists for The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, Britain’s oldest literary award, were announced this evening.

Click on the titles to read the reviews the books received*

Fiction shortlist

Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey (Picador)

A Mercy by Toni Morrison (Chatto)

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Faber)

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif (Jonathan Cape)

Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones

Biography shortlist

Arthur Miller 1915-1962 by Christopher Bigsby (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families by Michael Holroyd (Chatto)

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin (Bloomsbury)

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso)

Chagall: Love and Exile by Jackie Wullschlager (Allen Lane)

Two prizes, each of £10,000, are awarded annually by Edinburgh University for the best work of fiction and the best biography published in the previous year. The short list and eventual winners are selected by Professor Colin Nicholson and Professor Laura Marcus. The advisory committee for the awards includes Ian Rankin, Catherine Lockerbie, James Naughtie, Alexander McCall-Smith and James Boyle.

The winner will be announced in August at the Edinburgh book festival.

Click here for more information about the prize.

* The Omnivore started collecting book reviews in May 2008.