Nominees for a prestigious award named after one of Scotland’s best-known authors have been announced.
The Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction was first awarded in 2010 to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall.
Among the shortlisted writers this year are Lucy Caldwell with These Days and The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry.
Previous winner Robert Harris is nominated again for Act Of Oblivion and is joined by The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan and The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane.
READ MORE: Meet the Scots hockey team at the centre of Cold War peacekeeping
Ancestry by Simon Mawer and Devika Ponnambalam’s I Am Not Your Eve complete the line-up.
The award is sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, and the winner will receive £25,000.
Judging the contest this year will be Katie Grant (chair), Elizabeth Buccleuch, James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie, Kirsty Wark and, for 2023, award-winning documentary maker, journalist and writer Saira Shah.
The judges said: “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. 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 sixty 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 and James Robertson.
The winner will be announced at a special event at the Borders Book Festival on Thursday, June 15.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here