ED2014 News

Rory Mullarkey presented with drama award at the Fringe

By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 13 August 2014

As we pass the half-way point of this year’s Edinburgh Festival we are now heading into the awards zone with gongs aplenty due to be dished out in the coming ten days.

While most of those awards are for shows performing at the Festival, there are other cultural prizes that coincide with the festivities as well which cast their net wider when it comes to contenders. And that includes the James Tait Black Prizes, presented by the University Of Edinburgh.

These are the UK’s oldest literary awards, though as of last year an additional prize was added for new playwriting, and it was this that was presented in Edinburgh on Monday. The winner was Rory Mullarkey, who won the award for his first full-length play ‘Cannibals’, a play set in an ex-Soviet war zone which was premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester last year.

The new James Tait Black Drama Prize is judged by students and staff at Edinburgh University as well as reps from the Traverse Theatre and National Theatre Of Scotland. The Literary Manager of the latter, George Aza-Selinger, told the BBC of this year’s awards and winner: “It was an incredibly exciting field from which to choose a winner this year, but ‘Cannibals’ stood out from the very first scene. It was one of the most heart-rending and truthful depictions of love I’d ever read”.

The James Tait Black literary awards will now be announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 23 Aug.