Tales past and present win Britain's oldest literary awards

A biography that explores a pivotal year in William Shakespeare's life and a novel that charts an experiment in utopia in modern-day Detroit won Britain's oldest literary awards here on Monday night.

Award-winning authors James Shapiro and Benjamin Markovits joined the distinguished list of writers who have won the James Tait Black Prizes, which are awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh.

The winners of the 10,000-pound (about 13,000-U.S. dollar) prizes were announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The winner of the biography prize, 1606, William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro portrays how the events of 1606 shaped Shakespeare's writing in the tumultuous year of King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

James Shapiro is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and a leading authority on Shakespeare. The winning book is a sequel to 1599, which followed another eventful year in the life of the Bard, who died 400 years ago.

The winning book in the fiction prize, You Don't Have to Live Like This is set primarily in Detroit around the time of the financial crash and Barack Obama's election, in 2008.

It is the sixth novel by Benjamin Markovits, who was a professional basketball player before becoming a writer.

The author, journalist and critic who grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin, teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Each year, more than 400 novels are read by the University of Edinburgh's academics and postgraduate students who nominate books for the shortlist. The prizes were given respectively to works of Fiction and Biography written in English and published in the previous calendar year.

In 2013, the prize was extended to include a new category for drama, which will be announced next week.

Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Prizes were set up by the widow of publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her husband's love of good books.

Source : XINHUA