Best Historical Fiction of 2023: The Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Last updated: July 03, 2024
The latest shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction was announced in April 2023. The prestigious literary award—established in 2010 and named for the celebrated Scottish author—is awarded annually to the author of the best historical novel published in the UK, Ireland, and the Commonwealth over the previous year. The prize is £25,000.
We always find the Walter Scott Prize an excellent way to find new and notable historical novels, and this year the shortlist comprises seven books.
Speaking to Five Books back in 2020, chair of the judges Katharine Grant told us: "Well, as you’d expect, we have a set of criteria: originality, innovation, durability and quality of writing. But the boost given to historical fiction by the Walter Scott Prize means that these days we’re also looking for the literary challenge authors have set themselves: ambition, if you like."
The prize defines 'historical fiction' as novels that are set sixty or more years in the past. "But," as the noted judges in a statement, "how vividly they speak to the present."
These Days
by Lucy Caldwell
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
Lucy Caldwell's fifth novel is set during the Belfast Blitz, a series of four devastating major air raids on the Northern Irish city in 1941. It's "an under-told chapter in the fiction of my city," as Caldwell reflected; researching the book felt like "a strange, intense sort of solace" during the early days of the Covid crisis. The novel focuses on two sisters, Audrey and Emma, whose comfortable middle-class existence is shattered during the attacks. While announcing the shortlist for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, the judges noted that "the juxtaposition of the horrific and mundane and the authenticity of detail makes this novel an exceptional study of the terrors and consequences of war."
Act of Oblivion
by Robert Harris
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
The multimillion copy-selling author of Fatherland and The Ghost returns with a new historical novel set in New England during the 17th century. In it, two exiled English colonels—once signatories to Charles I’s warrant of execution—have fled to the American colony following the Restoration of the monarchy at home. It’s a fictionalised account that draws from documentary materials but invents characters and imagines scenarios. The Walter Scott Prize judges praised Harris’s “sinewy prose” and his ability to “plant the reader directly into the time and place of the story.” It’s “the work of a magnificent storyteller at the height of his game.”
I Am Not Your Eve
by Devika Ponnambalam
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
Devika Ponnambalam's historical novel presents the story of Teha'amana, the child-bride and muse of the French artist Paul Gauguin, and the girl who features in his most famous work, 'Manaò tupapaú' ('Spirit of the Dead Watching'). I Am Not Your Eve is written primarily from Teha'amana's perspective, but includes several other voices, creating the clash of cultures between the French colonists, Christian missionaries and the indigenous peoples of Polynesia. While presenting their 2023 historical fiction shortlist, the Walter Scott Prize judges said it was "a complex novel" that raised "uncomfortable issues of morality." It demands a lot of the reader, they added, but is "deeply rewarding."
The Sun Walks Down
by Fiona McFarlane
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
In The Sun Walks Down, a historical novel set in 1883 Australia, the disappearance of a six-year-old boy during a duststorm electrifies an outback community of farmers, artists, servants, cameleers and Aboriginal peoples, and forces a broader reckoning in this uneasy colonial society. This is a slowburn mystery of literary merit, with a complex, multi-layered plot and intense atmospheric effect. The 2023 Walter Scott Prize judges described it as a "rich and empathetic novel" which offered the reader the keys to understanding Australia, summoning its landscape—"at once beautiful and alien"—and its "burning sun" directly onto the page.
“The thing I love most about this book is just how wonderfully, beautifully, cleverly it’s written. The author shifts between characters in a way that doesn’t feel like she’s omniscient. She dives into the perspective of each character. And it’s so cleverly done. I keep reading it as a writer, wanting to analyse how she is doing it, but then I forget and suddenly I’m with someone else. It feels very natural! It’s a wonderful book. It centres on a missing boy, a missing white boy called Denny. He’s six years old and has sort of created his own mythology, which is perhaps what leads him to get lost in this dust storm.” Read more...
The Best Australian Historical Fiction
Kate Kruimink, Novelist
Ancestry: A Novel
by Simon Mawer
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
Mawer won the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for his novel Tightrope—the story of a female secret agent for the British during World War II. He returns to the shortlist with a new historical novel that delves into the stories from the author's own family tree. As the 2023 Walter Scott Prize judges observed: "he refuses to choose between fiction and fact," melding his archival research with imagined elements that takes us from poverty-stricken London to the Crimean War. It's an "ambitious novel" and a "memorable family odyssey that takes the reader into a fictional realm."
The Chosen
by Elizabeth Lowry
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
In The Chosen, Elizabeth Lowry examines—by way of historical fiction, drawn from fact—the troubled marriage of Thomas Hardy and his wife Emma. After Emma's death in 1912, Hardy read her diaries recording their years together; their contents, the story they told about their dissolving partnership, disturbed him so much that he burned them. "Combining meticulous research with a poet’s imagination, Lowry gives voice to both Hardy and to his downtrodden wife," said the judges of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize. "The result is an extraordinary work, full of tenderness and unexpected humour. It’s a portrait of a marriage gone wrong and an investigation into the grammar of grief. Along the way, we consider the parasitic relationship art can have with life, and the transcendent power of love."
The Geometer Lobachevsky
by Adrian Duncan
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
The Irish writer, artist and former structural engineer Adrian Duncan draws from his unusual blend of expertise in his novels—which have previously featured a Berlin construction site and a retired bridge engineer. The Geometer Lobachevsky is about a Soviet mathematician who has been working to survey peatbogs for mechanised harvesting in 1950s Ireland. But to describe it in such terms "is akin to relegating Leonardo’s Last Supper to thirteen men having dinner," protest the judges of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. "Like the bog Lobachevsky is surveying, the unassuming surface conceals ‘a subterranean ocean on a gusty day’." It's a "quiet gem" that brings a great, fitting precision to the inner life and melancholy predicament of our protagonist, as he attempts to evade a summons to return to the USSR.
