The James Tait Black Memorial Prize, awarded each year jointly to a novel and a biography, has gone this year to AS Byatt and John Carey.

Byatt received the prize, at a ceremony in Edinburgh yesterday, for her novel The Children’s Book and Carey for his biography William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies. Each award is worth £10,000.

Initiated in 1919 by Janet Coutts Black in memory of her late husband, the fiction prize has gone to many notable Irish novelists including Liam O’Flaherty (1925), Kate O’Brien (1931), Joyce Cary (1941), Mary Lavin (1943), Brian Moore (1975), John Banville (1976) and most recently Sebastian Barry (2008). Other notable winners have included EM Forster, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Salman Rushdie, James Kelman and Ian McEwan, and among biographers Ruth Dudley Edwards, Claire Tomalin, Richard Holmes, Roy Foster, Jenny Uglow, Rosemary Hill and Michael Holroyd.