The Long Take by Robin Robertson (published in the U.S. by Knopf) has won the £25,000 (about $31,470) 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, which "celebrates quality, and innovation of writing in the English language, and is open to books published in the previous year in the U.K., Ireland or the Commonwealth... the majority of the storyline must have taken place at least 60 years ago." Robertson is the first Scot and first poet to win the prize in its 10-year history.
The judges said, in part: "The Long Take recounts the inner journey of Canadian veteran Walker as he travels from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco attempting to rebuild his life after living through the horrors of war in Europe. In poetry of the utmost beauty, Robin Robertson interweaves themes from the great age of black and white films, the destruction of communities as cities destroy the old to build the new, the horrors of McCarthyism and the terrible psychological wounds left by war.
"Robertson shows us things we'd rather not see and asks us to face things we'd rather not face. But with the pulsing narrative drive of classic film noir, the vision of a poet, and the craft of a novelist, The Long Take courageously and magnificently boosts the Walter Scott Prize into its next decade."
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Sally Rooney won the Royal Society of Literature's £10,000 (about $12,590) Encore Award for best second novel of the year for Normal People (published in the U.S. by Hogarth).
Prize judge Edmund Gordon called the novel "an instant classic" that is "written with great intelligence, maturity, and sureness of touch"; Nikita Lalwani praised Normal People as "a fearless, indelible excavation of the politics of desire" and a "triumph of ambition and rightfully a classic for our times"; and Eley Williams observed that the "book's genius perhaps lies in the way assumptions or assertions of powerfulness and powerlessness--their erotic charge as well as their banality--can shape a person or the courses of lives."