These Days by Lucy Caldwell has won the £25,000 (about $32,050) 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The book, organizers said, is "a story of loss and love set during the aerial bombardment of her home city [of Belfast] in 1941, which caused some of the worst urban devastation in the U.K. in the whole of the Second World War."
The judges said in part, "In Lucy Caldwell's These Days we found a pitch-perfect, engrossing narrative ringing with emotional truth. Through the visceral shock of the 1941 Belfast Blitz the reader learns exactly what war means--'the twinkling of an eye, and all of us changed,' as Florence Bell, mother to Emma and Audrey, recalls of a previous agony. Change comes to the city of Belfast in the form of utter destruction, and to the Bell family in the form of love. A story of both great violence and great tenderness, These Days ends at eleven minutes past eleven o'clock, carrying all the freight that number holds. 'Have you lived a life that is true?' Lucy Caldwell asks. For the 2023 Walter Scott Prize, it was a winning question."
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Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India's Freedom by Ramachandra Guha has won the £5,000 (about $6,300) Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography.
The chair of the judges Roy Foster commented: "From an immensely strong field the judges have chosen a book where the author's deep empathy and impressive scholarship are lit up by a passionate regard for his subjects. Ramachandra Guha's Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India's Freedom profiles seven people, from Britain, America, and Ireland, who adopted India's struggle for independence and in doing so found their own destinies. The experience of India changed their ideologies, their spirituality, and often their names. In tracing their relationships revolving around the magnetic figure of Gandhi, Guha adds a new perspective to the Mahatma's life, on which he has already focused so rewardingly in his multi-volume biography. Alert to his subjects' disappointments and occasional delusions, he salutes their commitment to a new way of life and their prescience about the needs of a post-colonial world and India's place in it. Rebels Against the Raj shows how historical biography can illuminate the temper of the times through immersion in individual lives. As Guha points out, oppression does not disappear with the ending of colonial rule, and the ideas and priorities incisively drawn out in this book deserve urgent attention in today's India."
In addition, in honor of the prize's 20th anniversary, the judges decided to award a special citation to a work that "fulfils the spirit and achievement of historical biography as epitomised by Elizabeth Longford, notably in her canonical lives of Wellington and Victoria." The citation went to Michael Broers for his biography of Napoleon, published in three volumes as Soldier of Destiny, 1769-1805 (2014), The Spirit of the Age 1805-1810 (2018) and The Decline and Fall of an Empire 1811-1821 (2022).
Roy Foster: "While steeped in scholarship and making accomplished use of Napoleon's recently-released personal documents and correspondence, Broers writes with such style, pace and intimacy that the excitement of his subject's breathtaking career is made new all over again. Napoleon's complex personality, the centrality of his tumultuous family relationships and both his marriages, the mystique of his attachment to his army comrades, and theirs to him: all are patterned against a masterly survey of Europe in its revolutionary era, the rise of romanticism, and the imprint which Napoleonic energies left on the structures of French government and national life, still so evident today. Broers's original research illuminates a titanic figure, delineated with finely-tuned judgement and consistent readability. This is historical biography at its very best, perpetuating the qualities which Elizabeth Longford brought to the genre and which this Prize exists to celebrate."