Belben and Hill win literary award
LONDON (AP) - August 22, 2008 Belben won the fiction prize for "Our Horses in Egypt," which
tells the story of a young war widow who travels to the Middle East
to retrieve her mare in the aftermath of World War I - and follows
the horse itself as it struggles to survive conflict and privation.
Hill took the best biography award for her first book: "God's
Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain," a study of
Augustus Pugin, one of Victorian Britain's leading architects.
The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, announced Friday, are
awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh for the best work
of fiction and the best biography published during the previous
year. Both prizes are worth $18,500.
"Rosalind Belben's novel was innovatively plotted and
convincingly executed, while Rosemary Hill's first book is a
biography that does justice to the many facets of the man Augustus
Pugin and his work," said Colin Nicholson, the awards' manager.
The prizes were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats, the widow of
publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her husband's love of
reading.
Past winners include D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh,
Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy and Graham Greene.
