‘On the Greenwich Line’ Wins James Tait Black Prize

MAY 29, 2026 — Katharine Halls’ translation of Shady Lewis’s On the Greenwich Line won this year’s James Tait Black Prize in the fiction category. The prize is one of the UK’s oldest, and many at its home, Edinburgh University, didn’t want it to go ahead during a marking boycott.

The James Tait Black Prizes were established in 1919. This year, they announced two winners: The fiction prize went to On the Greenwich Line, which was published by Peirene Press, while the biography prize went to The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henri Christophe,written by Marlene L. Daut and published by Yale University Press.

Each winner receives £10,000.

On the Greenwich Line is based loosely around the death of a Syrian refugee in London. The narrator, an Egyptian who works in the British social services administration, who has promised a friend in Egypt to take care of the man’s burial in London, even if he never knew him.

As our Olivia Snaije writes:

What follows is a biting and hilarious journey through the British administrative services, run for the most part by immigrants, who have much to say about the gaping inequalities and absurdities of a system crumbling from years of neo-liberal economics. Lewis’s narrator highlights the arrival of the conservative party, which slashed the social housing budget by more than half, despite millions of requests for social housing. The administrative procedures necessary for these requests were multiplied so that each file can now take years, thus delaying the process.

In a prepared statement, Professor Alex Thomson said that this year’s winners “demonstrate the remarkable power of literature to illuminate lives, histories and communities that are often overlooked. On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis, translated by Katharine Halls, is a deeply humane and sharply observed novel about migration and belonging in contemporary Britain, while The First and Last King of Haiti by Marlene L. Daut offers a powerful re-examination of Haiti’s revolutionary history through the life of Henry Christophe.”

The prizes are judged by literature scholars and students at the University of Edinburgh; in comments to the Edinburgh News, Sophia Woodman, President of the UCU Edinburgh Branch Committee, criticized university management for the “knock-on impact of refusing to pay staff on research, knowledge exchange, teaching and all the work that academic staff do beyond marking, which includes judging for the James Tait Black Prize.”

Dr Hannah Kate Boast was the lead judge but pulled out of the judging process; she had earlier warned that the prize would not go ahead.