Celebrating the James Tait Black Prizes 2024 – with JTB Visiting Writer George Szirtes
Friday May 17th, 5PM, Project Room, 50 George Square, 1.06. A reception will follow.
The inaugural LLC-based annual JTB Awards event. We will celebrate this year’s James Tait Black Prizes in Fiction and Biography, discussing the year’s shortlisted writers and winners, and hearing from some of our brilliant student readers.
We will be joined by the wonderful poet George Szirtes, who won the Biography and Life-Writing prize in 2020 with The Photographer at Sixteen: The Death and Life of a Fighter (MacLehose Press). George will discuss the memoir, and his poetry, in conversation with staff judge Simon Cooke, who described the book as ‘a piercingly beautiful memoir-as-prose-poem, as generous as it is scrupulous in its searching meditation on a death and life, on memory and history, and on how we imagine the lives of those we love.’ On winning the prize, George Szirtes also gave a statement: ‘I am delighted, grateful and astonished to be awarded the James Tait Black Prize, especially given such a marvellous shortlist. I am a poet and the book is written much as a poet would write it, not so much a straight story as a set of mysteries in reverse time order, starting from my mother’s suicide in 1975, through concentration camps and refugee status, ending with a set of studio photographs of her early childhood in Transylvania. She died before she saw any of my books in print. The Photographer at Sixteen is an attempt to bring her to life.’
