The longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been unveiled, with Nadifa Mohamed, Sebastian Faulks, and Colm Tóibín among the 13 authors in the running for the literary prize.
Mohamed was nominated for The Fortune Men, her novel about a Somali immigrant wrongfully accused of murder in 1950s U.K. The book was previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award.
Faulks made the longlist for Snow Country, along with Tóibín for The Magician. Also nominated were Sarah Winman for Still Life and filmmaker Neil Jordan for The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small.
Also nominated were Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards, Andrew Greig’s Rose Nicolson, Stacey Halls’ Mrs England, Ciarán McMenamin’s The Sunken Road, James Robertson’s News of the Dead, Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room, Amanda Smyth’s Fortune, and J.R. Thorp’s Learwife.
The Walter Scott Prize was founded in 2010. Previous winners have included Andrea Levy for The Long Song, Robert Harris for An Officer and a Spy, Christine Dwyer Hickey for The Narrow Land, and Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall and The Mirror and the Light.
A shortlist for the award will be announced in April, with the winner revealed at the Borders Book Festival in Scotland in June.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
