Reading List · Literary Prizes
Walter Scott more or less invented the historical novel, and since 2010 a prize in his name has gone every year to the best one. The rule is simple: most of the book has to be set at least sixty years before it was published. The winners run from fourteenth-century China to the frozen English winter of 1963, and two writers, Hilary Mantel and Sebastian Barry, have won it twice.
By Lisanne Swart · 17 winners since 2010 · Historical fiction · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 22 September 2026
Click a title to read about that book further down ↓
The 2026 prize went to Alice Jolly on 11 June 2026 at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose. The next shortlist usually follows in April and the winner in June; this page is updated when they are out.
Quick answer
The Walter Scott Prize is a British prize for historical fiction, given every year since 2010. The winner receives £25,000, and more than half of the book must be set at least sixty years before it was published. It is open to novels in English first published in the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth. There have been 17 winners; the latest is Alice Jolly’s The Matchbox Girl (2026), set in a children’s clinic in Vienna in the 1930s and 1940s.
How this page chooses
This page has every winner, so there is nothing to choose between: the timeline at the top shows all seventeen with the period each one is set in, and every title has its own entry further down, in the same order.
Under each book is a line of plain fact about the book or its author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first, one for each year. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
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Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son from Putney, rises to become Henry VIII’s chief minister while the king breaks with Rome to marry Anne Boleyn. The novel ends with the execution of Thomas More.
It also won the Booker Prize in 2009.
July, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation, tells in old age the story of her life through the last years of slavery and the first years of freedom, pushed by her son to write it down.
Levy’s Small Island was Whitbread Book of the Year in 2004.
Lilly Bere, in her late eighties and grieving her grandson, looks back on the life that began when she had to flee Sligo after the First World War and make a new one in the United States.
It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2011.
Teoh Yun Ling, who survived a Japanese camp in the war, goes to the Cameron Highlands to ask a Japanese gardener, Aritomo, to make a garden in memory of her sister, during the Malayan Emergency.
It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012.
Georges Picquart, the new head of French army intelligence in 1896, finds evidence that the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, sent to Devil’s Island for treason, is innocent, and that the army knows it.
Robert Harris is also the author of Fatherland and Conclave.
The life of Wang Meng, one of the great painters of the Yuan dynasty, in the last decades of Mongol rule over China and the fighting that brought the Ming to power.
John Spurling is also a playwright.
Marian Sutro, a British agent who survived the Ravensbrück camp, comes home to London after the war and is drawn into the secret world again, as the Cold War and the atom bomb take over.
It continues the story of Mawer’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky.
Thomas McNulty, an Irish boy who survived the Famine, joins the US Army with his companion John Cole and fights in the Indian Wars and the Civil War, and the two of them make a family of their own.
It was also Costa Book of the Year in 2016.
David Hartley, “King David”, leads the Cragg Vale Coiners, a gang in the hills above Halifax who clip gold coins to make forgeries, until the authorities come after them.
Shane Meadows adapted it for BBC television in 2023.
Walker, a young Canadian who fought on D-Day, drifts through New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles after the war, in a novel written in verse, like a film noir.
It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018.
Michael, a ten-year-old German refugee, spends the summer of 1950 on Cape Cod, where he meets the painter Edward Hopper and his wife Jo, whose marriage is at its most difficult.
Edward and Jo Hopper did spend their summers in Truro, on Cape Cod.
The last part of Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy: from Anne Boleyn’s death to Cromwell’s own fall and execution in 1540.
Mantel is one of two writers to have won the prize twice, with Sebastian Barry.
Three stories from the same fictional glen in the north-east of Scotland, centuries apart, connected by a manuscript, a saint and the people who keep telling their stories.
Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006.
Two sisters, Audrey and Emma, live through the German air raids on Belfast in April and May 1941, and the choices the raids force on them.
Caldwell won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2019.
In colonial Trinidad in the 1940s, the families who live in the barrack houses of a sugar estate and the rich landowner on the hill are pulled together when he disappears.
Hosein, from Trinidad, won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2018.
Two young married couples, a doctor and his wife and a farmer and his, live as neighbours in the West Country during the hard winter of 1962 and 1963, when the snow shuts everything down.
Miller was also Costa Book of the Year in 2011, with Pure.
Adelheid Brunner, twelve, does not speak but writes brilliantly, and collects matchbox labels. She is a patient at the children’s clinic in Vienna where the doctor Hans Asperger worked, as the Nazis take over Austria.
It was published in November 2025.
Scott subtitled his first novel, Waverley, “’Tis Sixty Years Since”, and the prize’s rule echoes it: more than half of a book must be set at least sixty years before it was published. That is why The Land in Winter, published in 2024 and set in the winter of 1962, only just qualified.
The rule leaves plenty of room. The winners have gone as far back as fourteenth-century China and as close as post-war Cape Cod, and News of the Dead moves across three centuries in one Scottish glen.
The prize was set up by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose family was close to Scott, with the writer Alistair Moffat, and is now run by the Abbotsford Trust, which looks after Scott’s house. The winner is announced each June at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, a few miles from Abbotsford.
A British prize for historical fiction, given every year since 2010. The winner receives £25,000, and more than half of the book must be set at least sixty years before it was published.
Alice Jolly, for The Matchbox Girl, announced on 11 June 2026 at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose.
The majority of the book, more than half, must be set at least sixty years before its publication date. The number echoes the subtitle of Scott’s first novel, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since.
Two writers: Hilary Mantel, for Wolf Hall (2010) and The Mirror & the Light (2021), and Sebastian Barry, for On Canaan’s Side (2012) and Days Without End (2017).
£25,000 to the winner and £1,500 to each of the other shortlisted authors.
Novels written in English and first published in the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth in the year before the prize.
In June, at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose. The shortlist usually comes out in April.
Every winner has a full entry on this page. If you like Mantel’s Cromwell novels, start with Wolf Hall; if you want something shorter, These Days or The Land in Winter.
Winner list last verified 22 September 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Originality, innovation, ambition – The Matchbox Girl not only more than fulfils the judging criteria for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, it confronts a topic of immense complexity in a gripping tour de force.”
— The 2026 Walter Scott Prize judges
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