The Long Take

by Robin Robertson

🏆 Winner of the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

Written in verse, The Long Take by Scottish poet Robin Robertson is mostly set in post-war Los Angeles. It tracks a Canadian veteran of D-Day who has flashbacks to World War II and is suffering from PTSD. Though it did not ultimately win Britain’s top fiction prize, The Long Take was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is as beautifully written as you would expect a novel written by a poet to be.

Recommendations from our site

“Original, innovative and, in our judgement, durable, with writing of such power that you occasionally have to stop to recover. The Long Take is a work of supreme artistry. Walter Scott would have read it and marvelled.” Read more...

The Best of Historical Fiction: The 2019 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist

“It is a poem, mostly; it’s in free verse. Anybody who reads seriously admires writers who can make the constraints work—who can set themselves a challenge, a formal challenge, and solve it….. I admired this book very much. Again, you might say, ‘Oh, you just put a poem on there because you thought it would be edgy and different.’ But it’s on there because we all loved it and we admired it.” Read more...

The Best Fiction of 2018

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosopher

The book, according to the author

“I never set out to write fiction, and consider The Long Take to be a long narrative poem—though it is a ‘novel’ because it is novel: it is ‘new’.

Narratives are ways of seeing ourselves and our lives from a different perspective, so this gives weight to the importance of the oral tradition—primarily built from poetry and song—and which fiction has grown out of. All important art changes us, usefully: jolting our perspective and enlarging our gaze.

I showed a close-to-final draft to my first reader, and old friend, James Lasdun, and to my partner, Karin Altenberg. This is necessary, as writers generally lack objectivity.”

Robin Robertson on Books that Influenced Him