Darryl Pinckney wins James Tait Black Prize 2023

Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan won the James Tait Black Prize 2023 on July 26, 2023.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, awarded for literature written in the English language, are Britain’s oldest literary awards. The prizes, based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, were founded by Janet Coats Black in memory of her late husband, James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house of A & C Black Ltd in 1919. The awards are given for Fiction and Biographies written in English and published in the previous calendar year each worth £10,000 to the winner.

Some of the previous winners have been Eimear McBride, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Nadine Gordimer, John le Carré, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. Helon Habila and Saidiya Hartman made the shortlist in 2020 while Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and Shola von Reinhold were there in 2021.

The shortlist for 2023 was made public on July 19 before the winners were announced on July 26. The only writer of African descent winning was Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This is a memoir about the writer’s apprenticeship with authors Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and his introduction to the New York literary scene.

Biography Judge Dr Simon Cooke, of the University of Edinburgh, called Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan “thoroughly absorbing: a vivid, nuanced, and moving tribute to Elizabeth Hardwick, a fascinating portrait of a place, time, and milieu, and a profound meditation on memory, friendship, and the literary life.”

He added, “The Biography panel found Come Back in September a literary memoir of great generosity in its sense of tribute to others, and a formally fascinating inquiry into the diverse idioms of life-writing. It strikes many notes, fusing dazzling conversational wit and poised elegy, and the sentences are so supple, surprising, and graceful – it’s a masterclass in tonal integrity. The book stayed with us, and we feel sure we’ll keep coming back to it.”