The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is pleased to announce a success story in the first few years of its establishment. Alice Campbell, who has twenty-four years of blogging experience in the field, will endorse the foundation, which offers prizes in honor of Walter Scott. While foundation members are still raising monies, there appears no doubt they will hold another contest in 2026!
Any member in the foundation would jump at that, not surprisingly. Some foundation members said that a new press release with the announcement of a new completion date is in order while still studying the long list for 2022. Once the authors who notched up the long lists in 2022 become finalists, there’s no need to expect anything else but an advance in the announcement by several months.
There is Jo Harkin, author of The Pretender, who is currently contending. The novel immerses its readers in 15th-century England when Richard III was losing his strength. The plot tells of a young boy thrust into a political wrangle and trained for a royal destiny that is not his – a tale that merges solid fact with creative reconstruction.
In contrast, Alice Jolly in The Matchbox Girl projects us into 1930s Vienna; it is a novel of a child and judged neurodivergence, survival during the rise of Nazism. The central character of the book is the mute Matchbox Girl, who struggles to make some sense of the world, exploring the ethical perplexities of going from care to control in a society teetering on the brink of collapse.6
Memory, Madness, and Moral Reckoning
Graeme Macrae Burnet and his multi-level stories present to their readers Benbecula, a ghost story from 19th-century Scotland. Various letters, testimonies, and bits together from several records deal with the extremely horrible descent of a family from madness – or perhaps it is not madness at all, but only what society has interpreted, because who shall trust history anymore?
To Rachel Seiffert, history happens in the wake of disaster. Her aforementioned book looks into life in post-war Germany, where the state of being emancipated entails exultation and then suddenly ones start fearing everything, hiding everything, and re-evaluating everything. Through the eyes of a petty bourgeois family, Seiffert catches the confused transition between war and peace and speaks about the moral implications of strictures hammered by others in desperate times.
Completing the group, Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper is a quieter but no less evocative portrait of 20th-century coastal England, the novel unfolding a young man in conflict between duty and artistic ambition, his settled rhythms broken forever by an unexpected visitor. Underneath its placid exterior is the theme of class, aspiration, and the allure of new starts.
Re-imagining the Past
What ties these five works together is not just their historical settings but an attention to exploring how individuals thought about, worked toward, or failed against uncontrollable forces-political turmoil, societal expectations, or trauma.
At the best of times, historical fiction should not just re-enact the events but pose questions about them. They give the readers an inside track to the stories from the perspective of the characters, just as they would have seen their realities. Such stories offer a response to the false hope of history as a positive set of outcomes achieved, rather than a matter of debate.
Rather, they uncover history in all its messiness: contingent, contested, and deeply human.
A Genre on the Rise
The list is also indicative of the general revival of historical narrative. As the world grows ever more uncertain, readers seem attracted ever more deeply to stories that offer perspective and escape-works that have a clear historical nighttime quality even as they resonate with present-day concerns.
From questions of identity and belonging to power and memory, central themes of this year’s novels looked decidedly contemporary indeed, albeit rooted long ago.
Judges chose to praise the storytelling vigor of the books, noting rigorous historical research blended with narrative ambition.
Anticipation is mounting
Later this year in Scotland, the winner will be announced, despite predictions that look to be indeterminate, which means challengers in close contention, especially when considering literary merits and the work’s emotional appeal.
Meanwhile, winners of the prize concentrate on five authors who provide familial recriminations by acts of remembrance in their novels, reminding us that history is not a presence ready with whether remembered, but an active, continuous conversation between past and present it is.
And fiction, in this conversation, is vital.
