Monday, March 09, 2020

More historical fiction award news! Walter Scott Prize longlist and Langum Prize honorees

I've said before that I look forward to the announcement of the Walter Scott Prize longlist more than the ultimate winner: more new books to be introduced to. And aren't these covers beautiful?  Below are the 12 on the longlist for the 2020 prize. Most are from the UK editions, while some are from their US counterparts.  US editions exist for the majority of the books.


Read more about the longlist at the Walter Scott Prize site, including their plot and setting details: medieval England, 1940s Singapore, colonial South Africa, 20th-century Palestine, and more.  Look for the shortlist next month.

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And on the American historical fiction front, the 2019 Langum American Historical Fiction Prize winner and two finalists were revealed yesterday.

Watershed by Mark Barr (Hub City, 2019), the author's debut novel, takes place in small-town Tennessee during the Depression and "is an immersive historical experience, a pitch-perfect evocation of a time, a place, and a culture," reads the award announcement.

The two finalists for the Langum Prize are Ann Weisgarber's The Glovemaker, set in the Utah territory in the 1880s, and Stephanie Marie Thornton's American Princess, biographical fiction about Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

Congratulations to all the honorees!

6 comments:

  1. Thanks for the list. I was able to request a couple of them from Netgalley and I am so pleased about that.

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  2. I often find I don't recognise any of long list for the Walter Scott Prize.

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    1. I don't recognize a few of them and have only read one (Once Upon a River). But there are some I've purchased for the library.

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  3. I can enthusiastically recommend This Is Happiness, The Parisian, Once Upon a River, and The Redeemed, and I'm much looking forward to To Calais, in Ordinary Time. On the other hand, I can't recommend the Langum Prize-winner, The Watershed, which I thought fell flat after a terrific first chapter and never realized its premise.

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    1. You've read many more of them than I have. Once Upon a River was one of my favorites of last year. That's too bad that Watershed didn't live up to its promise.

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