Belfast author introduced as winner of Walter Scott Prize 2023
B
elfast author Lucy Caldwell has gained the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historic fiction on the Borders Book Festival being held in Melrose.
She scooped the £25,000 prize for her novel These Days, a narrative about loss and love set in the course of the aerial bombardment of her house metropolis in the course of the Second World War.
Her win was introduced at a public occasion on Thursday which additionally celebrated the brief record, with a number of the authors attending from as far-off as Australia.
Judges described her novel as a “pitch-perfect, engrossing narrative ringing with emotional truth” and praised the story for its “great tenderness” amid “great violence”.
It didn’t really feel like ‘historical past’ in any respect, it didn’t even really feel prefer it had occurred, it felt prefer it was taking place as I wrote it
The profitable writer immersed herself in eyewitness accounts of the Belfast blitz whereas she was writing the novel, interviewing survivors and mining the Mass Observation archive diaries of the Nineteen Forties and Fifties.
She mentioned: “These Days felt so alive to me as I was writing it, so urgent – it didn’t feel like ‘history’ at all, it didn’t even feel like it had happened, it felt like it was happening as I wrote it.”
Founded in 2009, the Walter Scott Prize is one among Britain’s most essential literary awards with earlier winners together with the likes of Sebastian Barry, Robert Harris, Andrea Levy and Hilary Mantel.
The 2023 Walter Scott Prize judging panel, chaired by Katie Grant, comprised Elizabeth Buccleuch, James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie, Saira Shah and Kirsty Wark.
Other shortlisted tales included The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan, Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris, The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry, The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane, Ancestry by Simon Mawer and I Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnambalam.
The prize is open to novels revealed within the earlier 12 months within the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth and set at the very least 60 years up to now.