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About the awards
Ian McEwan won the fiction prize for 2005.
The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are Britain’s oldest literary awards.
Two prizes, each of £10,000, are awarded annually by the University for the best work of fiction and the best biography published in the previous year.
They are the only awards of their kind to be presented by a university and have acquired an international reputation for recognising excellence in biography and fiction that continues today.
Past publishers whose works have been recognised by the prize include Faber, Chatto & Windus, Fourth Estate and Canongate.
Previous winners
Past winners of the fiction prize include Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan and literary giants such as D.H.Lawrence, E.M. Forster and Graham Greene.
Biography prize winners have recently included Janet Brown's account of Charles Darwin and Sue Prideaux's history of Edvard Munch.
Their works join those of Lytton Strachey, John Buchan and Lady Antonia Fraser as leading examples of the genre.
Any writer who is honoured with the James Tait Black is bound to be thrilled to be joining such a distinguished list of former winners.
Ian McEwan
Winner, Fiction 2005
This article was published on Feb 15, 2010