Hilary Spurling and Tatjana Soli have won the James Tait Black prize. The award is prestigious, for being decided by scholars and students of literature.
Soli won for her debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, which is set during the dying moments of the Vietnam War as a group of western journalists survey the decline. The protagonist, Helen, finds herself in the country after her brother was killed in action. Helen shuns the assorted gonzos in Saigon and goes native. The book received rave reviews, notably from Janet Maslin the New York Times.
Hilary Spurling, a one-time warden of this parish, won the biography prize for her book, Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China. Victoria Glendinning reviewed the book for the Spectator earlier in the year, and called it a ‘subtle and masterly book’.
The Guardian’s Edinburgh Literary Festival podcast looks at the city’s darker side, starting with Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic masterpiece, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Writing in the Telegraph, Sameer Rahim reviews Matthew Hollis’ ‘superb’ biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, which was recently book of the week on Radio 4.
‘In the winter of 1913, Edward Thomas’s life was drifting. He was a 34-year-old father of three stuck in an unsatisfying marriage. He had produced 20 books of biography and criticism, and more than 1,500 book reviews, most at high speed. Though The Times had described him as “the man with the keys to the Paradise of English poetry”, his emotional and artistic energies had been drained by criticising other people’s work.
There was little indication, at this point, that within four years Thomas would produce a book of poems that F R Leavis later judged as being of a “very rare order”; nor that Ted Hughes would describe him as “the father of us all”. Matthew Hollis’s superb biography focuses on what transformed a talented journalist into one of the most highly regarded nature poets of the 20th century.
He was inspired by his remarkable friendship with the American poet Robert Frost. Frost had moved to England in 1912 at the age of 38 and within two years had published his first two
collections.’
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