2007 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and Biography

A WORK OF FICTION and another of biography have been declared the winners of the 2007 James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, Britain’s oldest literary awards, it was announced today in Edinburgh, Scotland. Novelist Rosalind Belben’s Our Horses in Egypt (Chatto & Windus, 2007) won for fiction, while first-time nonfiction writer Rosemary Hill’s God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Allen Lane, 2007) won for biography. Hill, who took some 15 years to complete her biography, said she was both thrilled and honoured to win the prize: “I first heard of this award not as a writer but as a reader, where I found it set like a seal on everything I most admired in biography. It has been given, fearlessly, to books of many kinds—scholarly, experimental and iconoclastic. As a result it has become a gold standard and I am thrilled and very honoured to have won it.”