Walter Scott Prize launches poll to find the nation’s favourite historical novel

7th November, 2019

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is celebrating its tenth anniversary by getting a debate going – we have launched a poll to find the nation’s favourite historical novel of all time!   Nominations for books are invited via the form below, throughout November – suggest a novel and you could win a set of signed books or a book bag.  Anyone can nominate, and novels can have been published at any time – as long as they were written in English and set at least sixty years before their first publication, following the Prize’s own rule.

A shortlist of the ten novels with the most nominations will be published on our website in early December, and the poll will then open for voting.  The novel with the most votes will be crowned ‘The Nation’s Favourite Historical Novel’ in January 2020.

To help inspire nominations, and to encourage further reading, we have produced a poster, a Press Pack, and special Readers’ Guides to the ten books which have won the Prize, including new questions written by the authors themselves, to help book groups, libraries and individuals discover and delve deeper into this exceptional fiction. These are available to download free on our Resources page.  But you don’t have to nominate a Walter Scott Prize winner – it can be any book, as long as it could be classified as historical fiction when it was published.

Nominate your favourite historical novel of all time in the form below, and you automatically enter a draw to win an exclusive set of Walter Scott Prize winning books, signed by Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng, John Spurling, Robin Robertson and Simon Mawer.  Ten Walter Scott Prize 10th Anniversary book bags are also up for grabs.  So what are you waiting for – tell us your historical hits here!