The winner of the sixteenth Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been announced by The Abbotsford Trust.  

The twelve novels which were longlisted for the £25,000 Prize appear below.  More than half the longlisted books are from independent publishers and small presses, and the authors hail originally from England, Wales, Ireland, The Netherlands and Australia.  The settings of the longlisted novels span centuries, and even millennia: from Ancient Greece and Sicily to fifteenth-, sixteenth- and nineteenth-century England; from America at the turn of the twentieth century to Stalin’s Soviet Union and the global legacy of the Second World War; right up to events still fresh within living memory; the 1958 Munich air disaster and the long, hard winter of 1962.

A Shortlist was chosen by the judges and announced on 15th April, and the winner was announced at the Borders Book Festival and at Abbotsford on 12th June. 

The following LONGLISTED title is not currently available to order via this website:

The First Friend by Malcolm Knox, published by Allen & Unwin Australia