Australians longlisted for 2021 Walter Scott Prize

Four Australian authors have been longlisted for the UK’s £25,000 (A$44,440) Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Steven Conte was longlisted for The Tolstoy Estate, K M Kruimink for A Treacherous Country, Kate Grenville for A Room Made of Leaves, which was published in the UK by Canongate last year, and Pip Williams for The Dictionary of Lost Words, which will be published in the UK by Chatto & Windus in April 2021.

The 11 books longlisted for the prize are:

• Hinton (Mark Blacklock, Granta)
• The Tolstoy Estate (Steven Conte, Fourth Estate)
• The Year Without Summer (Guinevere Glasfurd, Two Roads)
• A Room Made of Leaves (Kate Grenville, Text)
• Mr Beethoven (Paul Griffiths, Henningham Family Press)
• Afterlives (Abdulrazak Gurnah, Bloomsbury)
• A Treacherous Country (K M Kruimink, A&U)
• The Mirror and the Light (Hilary Mantel, Fourth Estate)
• Hamnet (Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press)
• Islands of Mercy (Rose Tremain, Chatto & Windus)
• The Dictionary of Lost Words (Pip Williams, Affirm).

Now in its 12th year, the Walter Scott Prize awards the best fiction set 60 or more years ago, and is open to novels published in the previous year in the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth.

The 2021 longlist includes the winner of the inaugural Walter Scott Prize, Hilary Mantel, and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which won the 2020 Women’s Fiction Prize. The winner of last year’s Walter Scott Prize was Irish author Christine Dwyer Hickey, for her novel The Narrow Land (Atlantic).

The shortlist will be announced at the end of April, with each shortlisted author to receive £1500 ($2670). The winner, usually announced at the UK’s Borders Book Festival, will this year be announced online. For more information, see the website.

Category: Awards Local news