CRIME writers Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith have been drafted in to promote Britain’s oldest writing award.
The Edinburgh-based authors will make up a panel of the cream of Scotland’s writing talent when they get involved in the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes for Literature.
DH Lawrence, EM Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch and William Golding are
among the past winners of the prestigious 87-year-old Edinburgh University prize.
Joining Rankin and Smith on the panel are poet and playwright Liz Lochhead and Catherine Lockerbie, the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
The expert group will advise organisers on promoting the prize as part of a bid to bring it in line with the profile of other contemporary book awards.
Organisers at the university announced the names today, as well as this year’s shortlist. It includes Paradise by Dundee-born AL Kennedy, twice winner of the Scottish Arts Council Book Award and listed on the Granta/Sunday Times 20 Best British Young Novelists in 1993.
Kate Atkinson, Dundee- educated and past winner of Whitbread Book of the Year award, is also on the list with her novel Case Histories.
It will be the first time that such a panel has been so closely involved in the award, as part of a bid to widen the scheme’s appeal.
Two prizes have been up for grabs every year since the award’s inception in 1918.
Authors of the best novel and the best biography will this year get £3000 each.
The scheme stands out from other Scotland-based awards, as it is open to writers from across the world.
Edinburgh University graduate students read the entries before presenting judges Professor Colin Nicholson and Roger Savage with the shortlist.
Mr Nicholson, a literature professor who is organising this year’s event, said that the list of past winners is a "record of the best writing of the 20th and 21st centuries".
He has read all of the books on the latest shortlist, but has refused to reveal his favourites.
"I can honestly say that all of them reveal extremely high-class writing," he added.
"Writing has become more specialised over the past 200 years, and we still have high quality writing.
"This literary panel is a new development and we are still looking for others to join it. They are experts and they know the market."
Last year, writer Andrew O’Hagan picked up the prize for fiction with his novel Personality, while the biography award went to Janet Browne for her account of the life of Charles Darwin, The Power of Place.
O’Hagan’s novel explores the notion of celebrity by tracing the rise and fall of a young Scottish singer.
Browne is a specialist in natural history and evolutionary biology from the 17th to 20th century at University College London.
Jonathan Franzen, the American author of The Corrections, was the fiction winner the previous year.
