Established in 1919, the James Tait Black prize is the UK’s longest running literary prize. It’s also the only major book prize to be judged by scholars and students. Read on for this year’s biography shortlist.
Lifescapes: a biographer’s search for the soul by Ann Wroe (book available)
‘What is life?’ asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, have not solved the puzzle. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. In ‘Lifescapes’, acclaimed biographer and obituarist Ann Wroe reflects on a career spent pursuing life: a process, as she sees it, not of chronological narration but of trying to seize souls.
Traces of Enayat by Iman Mirsal (book and ebook available)
When Iman Mersal stumbles upon a great – yet forgotten – novel written by a young woman who killed herself shortly after her book was rejected by publishers, Mersal begins to research the writer. From archives, Enayat’s writing and Mersal’s own interviews and observations, a remarkable portrait emerges of a woman attempting to live independently.
This is not Miami by Fernanda Melchor (book and ebook available)
Set in and around the city of Veracruz in Mexico, ‘This is Not Miami’ delivers a series of devastating stories – spiraling from real events – that bleed together reportage and the author’s rich and rigorous imagination. These cronicas – a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative non-fiction, and novelistic forms – probe deeply into the motivations of murderers and misfits, into their desires and circumstances, forcing us to understand them – and even empathize – despite our wish to disdain them as monsters.
Ordinary notes by Christina Elizabeth Sharpe (book available)
A singular achievement, Christina Sharpe’s ‘Ordinary Notes’ explores, with immense care, profound questions about loss, pain and beauty; private memory and public monument; art; complexity; and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes that cumulatively gather meaning, artifacts from the past – both public ones and the poignantly personal – are skilfully interwoven with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence.
Fassbinder thousand of mirrors by Ian Penman (book and ebook available)
A kaleidoscopic study of the late West German film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982). Written quickly under a self-imposed deadline in the spirit of Fassbinder himself, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, ‘Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors’ presents the filmmaker as a pivotal figure in the late 1970s moment between late modernism and the advent of postmodernism and the digital revolution. Compelling, beautifully written and genuinely moving, echoing the fragmentary and reflective works of writers like Barthes and Cioran, this is a story that has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema and revolution.
Always reaching: the selected writings of Anne Truitt by Anne Truitt 
(book available)
Spanning more than fifty years, this comprehensive volume collects the letters, journal entries, interviews, lectures, reviews, and remembrances of the groundbreaking twentieth-century artist Anne Truit (1921-2004). Alexandra Truitt, the artist’s daughter and a leading expert on her work, has carefully selected these writings, most of which are previously unpublished, from the artist’s papers at Bryn Mawr College as well as private holdings.
For information on how to reserve books and ebooks please visit our library services page online https://www.wokingham.gov.uk/libraries/library-services
wokinghamboroughlibraries 