Caldwell, Duncan and Harris shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

Lucy Caldwell, Adrian Duncan and Robert Harris have been shortlisted for the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Each of the authors on the shortlist, which also includes Elizabeth Lowry, Fiona McFarlane, Simon Mawer and Devika Ponnambalam, will receive £1,500.

First awarded in 2010 to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), and sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, the prize honours Sir Walter Scott, the inventor of the historical fiction genre and Buccleuch kinsman. The judging panel comprises chair Katie Grant, Elizabeth Buccleuch, James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie, Kirsty Wark and, for 2023, Saira Shah.  

Caldwell has been shortlisted for These Days (Faber), which follows sisters Audrey and Emma after Belfast was bombed by the Germans on 7th April 1941. The judges said 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". 

Duncan, a structural engineer by training, has made the cut with a "quiet gem", The Geometer Lobachevsky (Tuskar Rock Press). The judges commented: "To say that Adrian Duncan’s The Geometer Lobachevsky  is the story of a man surveying an Irish bog is akin to relegating Leonardo’s Last Supper to 13 men having dinner. Like the bog Lobachevsky is surveying, the unassuming surface conceals ‘a subterranean ocean on a gusty day’." 

Meanwhile, Harris’ Act of Oblivion (Hutchinson Heinemann) features "sinewy prose, [and] vivid characters at odds with each other". It tells the story of Puritan Colonels Whalley and Goffe, signatories to Charles I’s warrant of execution, who "flee to America from their implacable royalist nemesis, Nayler". 

Of Act of Oblivion, the judges said: "Harris plants the reader directly into the time and place of the story. In a Massachusetts snow storm tiny flakes whip ’like musket pellets in a blizzard across the dead white fields’. We feel the heat of the fire of London and lurch with the waves during a wild storm at sea."

Lowry’s The Chosen (Riverrun) is also on the list, described by the judges as "a beautiful, insightful book [that] deals with a real-life historical mystery: why did Thomas Hardy, who had openly grown tired of his wife, fall into a deep well of despair at her unexpected death?"

McFarlane has been shortlisted for The Sun Walks Down (Allen & Unwin Australia), featuring "a dazzling array of characters, all trying to establish their place in the new, imagined settlement of Fairly, alongside the first nation experience". Meanwhile, Mawer’s Ancestry (Little, Brown), is described by the judges as "a family history opening on a Suffolk beach... bound to invite thoughts of David Copperfield".

In I Am Not Your Eve (Bluemoose), the judges said: "Devika Ponnambalam pours Paul Gauguin’s tormented but richly creative years in Tahiti and his relationship with Teha’amana: muse, child bride and subject of his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Dead."

This year’s winner will be announced at an event at the Borders Book Festival on Thursday 15th June 2023, which also honours the winners of the prize’s counterpart for young writers, the Young Walter Scott Prize. 

The judges said of the shortlist: "Cat and mouse with 17th-century regicides. Love in the Belfast blitz. The death of Emma Hardy. A lost boy (and so much else) in southern Australia. A Soviet exile in Ireland. A dig into personal ancestry. The voice of a voiceless muse. Seven very different stories with very different approaches have reached the shortlist for this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

"And as with the best historical novels, each book offers the reader more than the story. This year we explore martyrdom, self-knowledge, remorse, exile, art’s human price, complex relationships under an unsettling sun and the impossibility of knowing exactly who we are.

"As required by the prize criteria, all the novels on our 2023 shortlist are set 60 years or more in the past, but how vividly they speak to the present. We hope you’ll read, enjoy and watch out for the winner."

Previous winners include Sebastian Barry, Andrea Levy, Tan Twan Eng and Robert Harris.