Caldwell wins £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for These Days

Lucy Caldwell has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her novel, These Days (Faber). The book is set during the 1941 aerial bombardment of Belfast, which killed or injured 2,500 people, and caused some of the most severe urban devastation the UK saw during the Second World War. 

The winner was announced at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose on 15th June, in an event also celebrating the shortlisted authors. This year’s judging panel comprised Elizabeth Buccleuch, James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie, Saira Shah, Kirsty Wark, and was chaired by Katie Grant.

Fellow panel member and co-founder of the prize, Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch, had died a few weeks before the announcement.

The judges commented: "In historical setting, ambition and style, the 2023 Walter Scott Prize shortlist was at its most varied, and the judges’ discussions lengthy and impassioned. But in Lucy Caldwell’s These Days we found a pitch-perfect, engrossing narrative ringing with emotional truth.

"Through the visceral shock of the 1941 Belfast Blitz the reader learns exactly what war means – ‘the twinkling of an eye, and all of us changed’, as Florence Bell, mother to Emma and Audrey, recalls a previous agony. Change comes to the city of Belfast in the form of utter destruction, and to the Bell family in the form of love.

"A story of both great violence and great tenderness, These Days ends at 11 minutes past 11 o’clock, carrying all the freight that number holds. ‘Have you lived a life that is true?’ Lucy Caldwell asks. For the 2023 Walter Scott Prize, it was a winning question."

In writing about the Belfast Blitz, the four German raids on the city in April and May 1941, Caldwell interviewed survivors and studied the Mass Observation archive diaries of the 1940s and 1950s.  She said: "These Days felt so alive to me as I was writing it, so urgent – it didn’t feel like “history” at all, it didn’t even feel like it had happened, it felt like it was happening as I wrote it."

The Young Walter Scott Prize, the counterpart of the prize for young writers aged 11 to 19, was also awarded at the event. Winners Rosie Brooker and Ellie Karlin were awarded with £500 travel grants and printed anthologies containing their work. Accepting her award, Caldwell paid tribute to the two writers, saying that winning a writing prize when she was young gave her "rocket fuel" to pursue writing.