Novelist Rosalind Belben and first-time biographer Rosemary Hill have won Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes.
Belben won the fiction trophy for "Our Horses in Egypt," which tells the story of a young war widow who travels to the Middle East to recover her mare in the aftermath of World War I - and follows the cavalry itself as it struggles to hold out conflict and privation.
Hill took the best biography award for her first playscript: "God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain," a study of Augustus Pugin, one of Victorian Britain's leading architects.
The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, proclaimed Friday, are awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh for the best work of fiction and the best biography promulgated during the previous year. Both prizes are worth $18,500.
"Rosalind Belben's novel was innovatively planned and convincingly executed, piece Rosemary Hill's first playscript is a biography that does judge to the many facets of the man Augustus Pugin and his exploit," said Colin Nicholson, the awards' manager.
The prizes were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats, the widow of publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her husband's love of reading.
Past winners include D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy and Graham Greene.
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