Tuesday, August 18, 2015

James Tait Black prize goes to Zia Haider Rahman's debut novel

In the Light of What We Know takes £10,000 award for story encompassing issues from war in Afghanistan to the banking crisis

Zia Haider Rahman.
‘Extraordinary’ ... Zia Haider Rahman. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
Zia Haider Rahman has won Britain’s oldest literary prize, the James Tait Black award, for his first novel, In the Light of What We Know.

Rahman, who was born in Bangladesh and who has worked as an investment banker and a human rights lawyer, took this year’s prize at the Edinburgh international book festival on Monday evening for his story of an investment banker who receives a visit from an old friend.
James Wood in the New Yorker called In the Light of What We Know “astonishingly achieved for a first book”, while the Observer found it to be “an extraordinary meditation on the limits and uses of human knowledge, a heartbreaking love story and a gripping account of one man’s psychological disintegration”.
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