Cormac McCarthy has won the prestigious James Tait Black literary award for his post-apocalyptic novel, The Road. The award is the oldest and most literary of the U.K.’s many awards, and carries a £10,000 prize.
The 74-year-old, was awarded the James Tait Black memorial prize, worth £10,000, for his bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic America, The Road. The book won a Pulitzer, the US’s pre-eminent literary prizes, earlier this year, and is being widely noised as a powerful Nobel contender. The novel describes the journey of a father and son who are heading south in a world where a disaster has occurred, reducing nature to a nuclear-grey winter and humans to savage, scavenging cannibals. While the landscape is scorched and some of the set-piece encounters almost Beckettian, the nightmare vision is leavened by McCarthy’s austere language and his description of the powerful bond between theboy and his father.
*****
McCarthy beat another critical-commercial crossover success to the award - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with her epic tale of the Biafra war, Half of a Yellow Sun. The Nigerian-born 29-year-old has alalert won the Orange prize with the book, while also achieving bestseller status with a sales boost from a Richard and Judy endorsement.
Also in the running were the acclaimed Canadian brief story writer Alice Munro for The View from Castle Rock; Sarah Waters for her reverse-chronological account of the second world war, The Night Watch; James Lasdun with his thriller, Seven Lies; and debut novelist Ray Robinson with Electricity.
The Road was an Oprah’s Book Club selection.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
