Authors Cormac McCarthy and Byron Rogers are the winners of the 2007 James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize.

The coveted literary award, organised by the University of Edinburgh, is the oldest in the English language and honours two writers every year.

Pulitzer Prize-winning US author McCarthy, 74, won the best novel award for his book, The Road.

Byron Rogers was victorious in the biography category for his book, The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas.

Both winning authors picked up a cool £10,000.

Judge Professor Colin Nicholson, of the University of Edinburgh, said: "Each of the short-listed authors is prize-worthy, but my fellow judge, Roger Savage, agrees with me that for imaginative impact and page-turning readability the two winning books are both destined to become classics in their respective genres."

Rogers said: "It lifted my spirits to find an academic jury could award a prize to a literary biography that is not six hundred pages long and without footnotes. It of course lifted them even more to find out that I’d won it."

Past winners have included Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan and in the past literary giants such as DH Lawrence, EM Forster and Graham Greene were awarded the prize.

Last year's winners were Ian McEwan for Saturday and Sue Prideux for the biography, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream.

McCarthy's publishers, Macmillan, said the author "was very honoured to receive such a prestigious award".

This year's winners were announced on August 25 by BBC Radio 4 presenter James Naughtie at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The article McCarthy and Rogers scoop top book award originally appeared on 999 Today