2024 Walter Scott Prize finalists

The judges have announced the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction shortlist, which is now under the new management of The Abbotsford Trust. The six books vying for the £25,000 award are:

• THE NEW LIFE by Tom Crewe (Chatto & Windus)
• HUNGRY GHOSTS by Kevin Jared Hosein (Bloomsbury)
• MY FATHER’S HOUSE by Joseph O’Connor (Harvill Secker)
• IN THE UPPER COUNTRY by Kai Thomas (Viking Canada/John Murray)
• ABSOLUTELY AND FOREVER by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus)
• THE HOUSE OF DOORS by Tan Twan Eng (Canongate)

‘The Walter Scott Prize judging criteria – originality, innovation, ambition, durability, and quality of writing – are beautifully showcased in our 2024 shortlist. In addition, we have six novels as diverse in their subject matter as in the style of writing: an attempted sexual revolution in eighteenth-century London; dangerously entwined lives in 1940s Trinidad; gripping tensions in Nazi-occupied Rome; a gentle 1960s home-counties heartbreaker; stories within stories from the terminus of the Underground Railroad; and love, betrayal and scandal in the Straits Settlements of Penang. At the heart of each novel lies a deep understanding of humanity in all its quirky strengths and weaknesses, with each of the WSP 2024 shortlisted authors having something new to say and a new way of saying it.’

First awarded in 2010, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction honours Sir Walter Scott, the inventor of the historical fiction genre. Its 2024 judging panel comprises Katie Grant (chair), James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie, Kirsty Wark, and Saira Shah. The winner receives £25,000, and each shortlisted author is awarded £1,500, making the Walter Scott Prize among the richest fiction prizes in the UK. 

Books must have been written in English, set more than 60 years ago, and published in 2023 in the UK, Ireland, or the Commonwealth. This year’s shortlisted authors are from England, Ireland, Trinidad, Canada, and Malaysia.

This year, the Prize’s management moved to what might be considered its natural spiritual home, Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s extraordinary Borders home. The Hawthornden Foundation and the Duke of Buccleuch generously support the Prize.

The winner will be announced at a special public event and shortlisted at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose on Thursday, 13th June 2024, honouring the winners of the prize’s counterpart for young writers, the Young Walter Scott Prize.  Tickets for the event are now on sale here.

About the Shortlisted Books

THE NEW LIFE by Tom Crewe (Chatto & Windus)

The judges said: ‘The New Life is a remarkable first novel, demonstrating Tom Crewe’s formidable ability to render the sights,  sounds and smells of a period – the 1890s – with dash and assurance. His story of gay sexual awakening, based on historical events, is bold and unconfined, threading the first stirrings of social awareness with the shame and danger that gripped the lives of his central characters as they slipped in and out of the shadows and confronted rigid social conventions, and the law.  His exploration of the erotic thrills of discovery and the acceptance of sexual ambiguity makes this a novel of our age too, set beautifully in the past but written in a clear and passionate voice that speaks to a different future.’

HUNGRY GHOSTS by Kevin Jared Hosein (Bloomsbury)

The judges said: ‘1940s Trinidad, a blood oath, an absence. In Hungry Ghosts, we are drawn into a world of deep and thorny relationships not just between classes – Kevin Jared Hosein is too subtle a writer for that – but between individuals, their complex histories and the lure of a better, or at least different, future.  Like an artist on canvas, the author pаints a whole emotional world for the reader, his characters as full and rounded as the natural world he conjures in ‘all shades of green soaked with vermilion and red and purple and ochre’. Hungry Ghost is a sensational book in the literal sense of that word: you can see, smell, hear, taste, and almost touch Trinidad, and if the story is harrowing and full of shadows, there is a rare beauty in its telling.

MY FATHER’S HOUSE by Joseph O’Connor (Harvill Secker)

The judges said:  ‘Joseph O’Connor’s My Father’s House has many elements of a Walter Scott classic – not least its wonderfully drawn cast in this thrilling tale of wartime Rome based on real characters and events. Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and the Gestapo commander Paul Hauptmann pit their wits against each other as O’Flaherty and his co-conspirators use every subterfuge they can to help Jews and Allied prisoners escape from under the noses of German Occupying Forces. It is beautifully constructed, with Rome, and in particular, the Vatican City vividly rendered,  and proves that WW2, in the hands of a novelist as fine as Joseph O’Connor, still has many important stories to tell.’  

IN THE UPPER COUNTRY by Kai Thomas (Viking Canada/John Murray)

The judges said: ‘The story of European settlers, battling the elements in their sod cabins on the Canadian prairies, has been told many times, but Kai Thomas takes us into a very different world – that of the Black people who fled from slavery in the United States and made the perilous journey north along the ‘Underground Railway’ across the border into Ontario, where they established their free town. Intensive research underpins this finely written novel, but it never obtrudes. The reader is gripped by the characters of the two powerful women at its heart. The secret links that bind them are revealed gradually through a sequence of extraordinary stories, which explore the rarely told history of how closely the Black, Native and Métis communities of Canada were and are connected. With a cast of vibrant characters and magnificent descriptions of the landscape of Ontario, The Upper Country will enhance the reader’s understanding of how, in the aftermath of the ghastly experience of slavery, Black people began to repair their lives with courage and dignity, once their freedom had at last been achieved.’

ABSOLUTELY AND FOREVER by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus)

The judges said:  ‘Marianne Clifford, the child of conventional middle-class parents, has her life ruined by love and deceit. Rose Tremain’s evocative novel is set in rural West Berkshire, London and Paris. It charts the unsteady collapse of Marianne’s teenage dreams amidst the limitations of her life. Neither the future intended for her by her dull parents nor her romantic wishes will be granted in this short, sad and devastating novel, which reveals many unspoken truths about women’s lives in the 1960s.’

THE HOUSE OF DOORS by Tan Twan Eng (Canongate)

The judges said: ‘At once a satisfying murder mystery, a tale of human frailty, and a cool ‘reverse colonial gaze’ at the stultifying British social order of early twentieth century Penang, Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors visits big themes: the deadening effect of silence and the transformative power of storytelling. With the action flitting between a notorious real-life murder case in the British colony and Somerset Maugham’s visit there a decade later, this novel unfolds as elegantly as a set of Chinese boxes – or, indeed, a story by Maugham himself.  Its intricate twists and turns lead us to witness the creation process of stories themselves. Stories that are transformed as they pass from person to person until we finally understand that sharing tales connects us as human beings.’