Colm Tóibín, Nadifa Mohamed & Sunjeev Sahota among authors longlisted for 2022 Walter Scott Prize
The Walter Scott Prize awards a grand prize of £25,000 to a work of historical fiction
International authors Colm Tóibín, Nadifa Mohamed & Sunjeev Sahota are on the longlist for the 2022 Walter Scott Prize. The annual £25,000 ($42,834 Cdn) award is given to the previous year's best work of historical fiction published in English.
Irish author Tóibín has been longlisted for The Magician, a decades-spanning novel that reimagines the art and life of German novelist and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Thomas Mann.
Somali British writer Nadifa Mohamed is on the longlist for the novel The Fortune Men, which was also shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and Costa Best Novel Award. The Fortune Men reframes the life and death of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali seaman who was unjustly tried and executed in the U.K. in the 1950s.
British novelist Sunjeev Sahota is also on the longlist for the novel China Room, which was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. China Room was inspired by the life of Sahota's own great-grandmother and imagines her in 15-year-old Mehar, a spirited young woman who risks her life in pursuit of passion in 1929 India.
Historical novels by authors from across the Commonwealth round out the longlist:
- Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton
- Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks
- Rose Nicolson by Andrew Greig
- Mrs England by Stacey Halls
- The Ballad Of Lord Edward And Citizen Small by Neil Jordan
- The Sunken Road by Ciarán Mcmenamin
- News Of The Dead by James Robertson
- Fortune by Amanda Smyth
- Learwife by J.R Thorp
- Still Life by Sarah Winman
There are no Canadians on the longlist. The shortlist will be announced in April, and a winner will be announced in mid-June at an event in Scotland.
The 2021 winner was Hilary Mantel for The Mirror and the Light, the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.
Let the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WalterScottPrize?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WalterScottPrize</a> longlist sweep you away: ancient Scottish glens; interwar Vienna, Paris and Northern Ireland; WW2 Tuscany; 1920s Punjab and Trinidad; Revolutionary America, 1950s Cardiff, smog-laden East London and more. Explore the list: <a href="https://t.co/L4yVYlmch1">https://t.co/L4yVYlmch1</a> <a href="https://t.co/uQ8ZO4Pf5y">pic.twitter.com/uQ8ZO4Pf5y</a>
—@waltscottprize