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James Robertson has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for News of the Dead (Hamish Hamilton), a novel of "enduring appeal" set in in a fictional Scottish glen.
The annual award recognises the best historical fiction set 60 or more years ago.Robertson triumphed over Andrew Greig’s shortlisted Rose Nicolson (Quercus), Fortune by Amanda Smyth (Peepal Tree Press) and Colm Tóibín’s The Magician (Penguin).
Robertson was presented with a cheque for £25,000 and an original print of a Borders landscape taken by photographer Walter Dalkeith at a ceremony hosted by the Duke of Buccleuch at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland.
The judging panel featured Elizabeth Buccleuch, James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie, Kirsty Wark and chair Katie Grant. They said: "After 12 winners set outside the homeland of our prize’s namesake, Sir Walter Scott – from Malaysia and China to the US, continental Europe, Ireland and England—it felt something of a homecoming to choose a book set in Scotland as our winner. In James Robertson’s masterful News of the Dead, the fictional glen in which the novel is set frames lives through three different centuries exploring what is true, what we believe to be true and what we’d like to be true.
"The novel fulfils in abundance the prize’s key criteria of ambition, originality, innovation, enduring appeal and quality of writing and we hope readers will enjoy not just the glen itself with all its ‘dangers and gifts, its capabilities and limitations’, but the cast of characters the author assembles, always with a twinkle in his eye. After the pandemic hiatus, we’re delighted to award James Robertson the Walter Scott Prize at a live event where we can congratulate him in person."
Robertson said: "Scott’s life and work have had an influence on my own writing. I don’t think of myself as a historical novelist, but as a writer with a deep interest in history and time. I’m speechless at winning this award."
Leo Wilson and Oliver Dhir won the Young Walter Scott Prize, the prize’s counterpart for young writers, and were presented with £500 travel grants and printed anthologies containing their work.
The Walter Scott Prize was founded in 2009, and is open to novels published in the previous year in the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth. It was founded by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch to honour the achievements of Sir Walter Scott, considered to be the originator of the historical novel.