2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and Biography

A WORK OF FICTION and another of biography have been declared the winners of the 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, Britain’s oldest literary awards, it was announced on Friday, August 21, 2009, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Acclaimed Irish novelist Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (Faber & Faber, 2008) won for Fiction, while one of the UK’s foremost biographers Michael Holroyd’s A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (Chatto & Windus, 2008/Vintage, 2009) won for Biography.