The 2025 winner of the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction is The Land In Winter by Andrew Miller. I was curious to look at the finalists for this prize and in the process discovered an interview with Katherine Grant, one of the judges. Grant is a British novelist and has been a judge for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction since 2017.
In the interview – on a site called Five Books – Katherine Grant provides features of each finalist. Many such features are what you might expect of any excellent novel: pacing, a gift for language, theme, writing style, emotional complexity and so on.
What interests me are the unique demands Grant highlighted for historical fiction. For example, when commenting on The Land In Winter, she says:
“Andrew Miller has subtly identified a moment – perhaps the moment – when we [Britain] shifted from looking backwards to the Second World War which, for so many, was still the defining event of their lives, towards the future.”
For another finalist, Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon which is set during the Pelopponesian War – “As a writer you have a different, and in some ways more daunting, challenge: to try to recreate lives, mindsets and experiences which are, if we’re being truthful, pretty unknowable.”
Commenting on The Book of Days by Francesca Kay, Grant applauds the author’s ability to depict the culture shock a reader experiences when reading historical fiction set in the distant past when “religious faith underpinned every facet of life in western Christendom.”
With The Mare by Angharad Hampshire, the challenge for the author was to get inside the mind of “an ambitious female Nazi concentration camp guard” during WWII.
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry is set in 1890s Montana. Grant compliments the author’s ability to “conjure up a street, a scene, a person” from the past.
And as a cautionary note:
Katherine Grant mentions that the judges have also “read books whose writers paste twenty-first century mindsets, morality and preoccupations onto people living in times that had completely different mindsets, morality and preoccupations. Such books may be novels but they aren’t historical novels and it’s a bit depressing when they’re labelled as such. Historical novels should respect the past. If you don’t respect the past, this genre is not for you.”
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M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.
