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Faulks and Halls battle it out on Walter Scott longlist
The £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction’s longlist this year features Sebastian Faulks, Stacey Halls and Colm Tóibín among others.
Thirteen novels are in contention for the £25,000 prize, with settings spanning from the 8th-century BC up to the 1960s.
The longlist includes Faulks’ Snow Country (Hutchinson Heinemann), Halls’ Mrs England (Manilla Press), The Magician by Tóibín (Viking) and Still Life by Sarah Winman (Fourth Estate). Also listed is The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed (Viking), Rose Nicolson by Andrew Greig (Riverrun), News of the Dead by James Robertson (Hamish Hamilton) and Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room along with The Sunken Road by Ciarán McMenamin (both published by Harvill Secker).
For the indies, Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton (Fairlight Books) is represented as is The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small by Neil Jordan (Lilliput Press), Fortune by Amanda Smyth (Peepal Tree Press) and J R Thorp’s Learwfie (Canongate).
The prize judging panel comprises chair Katie Grant, Elizabeth Buccleuch, James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie and Kirsty Wark.
The judges said: “We may have been more confined in recent years, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the same cannot be said for our imaginations. This year’s longlist promises to sweep readers through Europe and beyond, taking in sixteenth-century Scotland; inter-world war Vienna, Paris and Northern Ireland; bomb-blasted Second World War Tuscany; and on to the jostling Cardiff docks of the 1950s and London’s smog-laden East End: from ancient Scottish Glens and isolated Yorkshire mansions to a stifling room in 1929 Punjab; and from the oil-hungry Trinidad of the 1920s to the battlefields of the American War of Independence.
“These stories are told through characters both imagined and borrowed from the pages of history: we encounter writers Thomas Mann and E M Forster; French artist Yves Klein; an unheard voice from Shakespeare’s King Lear; 18th-century aristocrat-turned-Irish-independence-revolutionary Lord Edward FitzGerald; and wrongly accused Somali sailor Mahmood Mattan. The 2022 WSP longlist offers much to think about; much to admire; and, most importantly, much to enjoy.”
The winner receives £25,000, and each shortlisted author is awarded £1,500. A shortlist of around six books will be announced in April, and a winner announced at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland, which runs from 16th to 19th June.
