Lucy Caldwell wins Walter Scott prize

In the festival’s first event, Belfast writer Lucy Caldwell won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for her novel These Days, a story of loss and love set during the aerial bombardment of her home city in 1941, which caused some of the worst urban devastation in the UK in the whole of the Second World War.

Winner of the Walter Scott Prize, Lucy Caldwell. Photo: Lloyd Smith.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, founded in 2009, is one of Britain’s most important literary awards. Previous winners include Sebastian Barry, Robert Harris, Andrea Levy and Hilary Mantel.

The judges said: “In historical setting, ambition and style, the 2023 Walter Scott Prize shortlist was at its most varied, and the judges' discussions lengthy and impassioned.

"But in Lucy Caldwell’s These Days we found a pitch-perfect, engrossing narrative ringing with emotional truth.”

Lucy said: “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."

The 2023 Walter Scott Prize judging panel comprised Elizabeth Buccleuch, James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie, Saira Shah, Kirsty Wark, and was chaired by Katie Grant. The judges were deeply saddened by the death of their fellow panel member and co-founder of the Prize, Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch, a few weeks before the announcement.

The prize for young writers, the Young Walter Scott Prize, was also awarded, and its two winners, Rosie Brooker and Ellie Karlin, were presented with £500 travel grants and printed anthologies containing their work.