Despite declaring that he doesn’t “consider [himself] a historical novelist at all”, Simon Mawer has won the £25,000 Walter Scott prize for historical fiction.
Mawer won the award for his novel Tightrope, which continues the story of Marian Sutro, who has survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp and is now living in 1950s London. The Walter Scott prize, set up by the author’s distant relatives the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, defines a historical novel as one in which the majority of events take place at least 60 years ago, as per Scott’s subtitle for his novel Waverley: or ’tis Sixty Years Since.
Previous winners of the £25,000 award include Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall, set in the 16th century, and An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris, set in 1895 Paris. Mawer, who was shortlisted for this year’s prize alongside writers including William Boyd and Patrick Gale, said on being shortlisted that “I don’t consider myself a historical novelist at all. All I do is write novels about what interests me at the time … and the recent past is where my particular interests lie.
He added: “However, I think our collective past should be important to everyone: if we don’t comprehend where we’ve come from, then we won’t have any idea where we are going.”
Judges for the award called Tightrope “a spy story in the grand tradition, sweeping the reader irresistibly into the harrowing life of a secret agent in the second world war”, and an “impeccably researched” novel that “perfectly inhabits its time and place”.
But the book “is more than a very good spy thriller”, said the panel, which included the authors Jackie Kay and Elizabeth Laird, and the journalists James Naughtie and Kirsty Wark. “We are used now, in a century already scarred by wars, to the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder,” they continued. “There was no such diagnosis in the aftermath of the 20th century’s terrible wars, but it afflicted millions, nevertheless. Simon Mawer has given us, in the character of Marian Sutro, a study of how the terrifying events she endured in her youth shaped and transformed the rest of her life.”
The judges called Marian Sutro, who first appeared in Mawer’s novel The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, “a commanding character, enigmatic and fascinating [who] walks the tightrope between the people in her life who have sent her into danger, those whom she must fear, and those she seeks to protect”.
On winning the prize this weekend, Mawer said: “I would like to thank Marian Sutro, who is very close to my heart, and probably of all my characters, in all my fiction, is the one most alive to me, and I owe her a great deal.” The author, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize for his novel The Glass Room in 2009, has lived in Italy for more than 30 years.
