Books by Zadie Smith and Tan Twan Eng longlisted for the £25k Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), Benjamin Myers’ Cuddy (Bloomsbury) and Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors (Canongate) are among the books longlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The winner will receive £25,000, and each shortlisted author will be awarded £1,500.

The news of the longlist comes alongside the announcement of a change of management, with the prize moving to The Abbotsford Trust from this month.

Among the 12 novels in contention for the £25,000 prize are Tom Crewe’s The New Life (Chatto & Windus), Stephen Daisley’s A Better Place (Text Publishing) and Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts (Bloomsbury). Also on the list are Victoria MacKenzie’s For Thy Great Pain, Have Mercy On My Little Pain (Bloomsbury), Joseph O’Connor’s My Father’s House (Harvill Secker) and Alan Spence’s Mister Timeless Blyth (Tuttle). The final three titles on the list are Kai Thomas’ In the Upper Country (Penguin Canada), Rose Tremain’s Absolutely and Forever (Chatto & Windus) and Sally Magnusson’s Music in the Dark (John Murray).

The judging panel this year is chaired by Katie Grant, and comprises James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie, Kirsty Wark and Saira Shah.  

“This year’s longlist sweeps us from one end of the world to the other, and from the Dark Ages to the 20th Century —almost a millennium-and-a-half," said Grant. "Along the way we hear tales of 15th-Century Norwich and of the Highland Clearances of the 1800s; of the secret railroad through the Americas during the mid-19th Century and of forbidden love in London at the turn of the 20th; from tropical Jamaica to Japan and Korea in the late 1800s, and to sultry Penang as the 20th Century dawns; onwards to Trinidad, to Rome, to Crete and to New Zealand during the Second World War years; and to London and Paris in the swinging 1960s when anything seems possible."

The chair added: "From the epic to the intimate, from the philosophical to the swashbuckling, from the traditional to the experimental, in each book emotions run deep. If you read the whole list, just like the panel of judges, you’ll never be short of conversation.”

Moreover, from February 2024, the prize is being managed by The Abbotsford Trust, which is responsible for Sir Walter Scott’s Borders home. With the support of The Hawthornden Foundation, and the ongoing patronage of prize founder and Abbotsford patron the Duke of Buccleuch, the existing Walter Scott Prize team and judges will continue their work.

The Duke of Buccleuch, founder of the Walter Scott Prize and patron of The Abbotsford Trust, said: “For some time it was the dream of my late wife and myself that the Walter Scott Prize should take root in the great writer’s own home and creation at Abbotsford. Now that the prize, 15 years on, is firmly established in the literary calendar I am utterly delighted that this is being realised and am deeply grateful to the Abbotsford Trustees for taking over the baton and to The Hawthornden Foundation for making it possible.”

A shortlist will be announced in May, and the winner announcement and prize-giving event will take at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, in June.