New Walter Scott prize to honour historical novels

Inaugural £25,000 award to be presented in June at Borders book festival

Alison Flood, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2 February 2010y

He is seen as the father of the historical novel, so it's perhaps only fitting that a new literary prize honouring the genre is to be launched in the name of Sir Walter Scott.

The £25,000 award is being set up by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Scott. They hope the award will help to "properly honour" the author's "immense achievements", and "place as one of the world's most influential novelists".

Scott's novel Waverley, published in 1814 and set during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, is regularly described as the first historical novel. Telling the story of daydreaming Englishman Edward Waverley and his decision to ally himself with Scottish highland chieftain Fergus, his beautiful sister Flora and the Jacobite cause, its subtitle "Tis Sixty Years Since", is being used by the prize's organisers to define parameters for entry, with a historical novel deemed to be one where the events described take place at least 60 years before publication.

"By fixing, then, the date of my story Sixty Years before this present 1st November, 1805, I would have my readers understand, that they will meet in the following pages neither a romance of chivalry nor a tale of modern manners; that my hero will neither have iron on his shoulders, as of yore, nor on the heels of his boots, as is the present fashion of Bond Street; and that my damsels will neither be clothed 'in purple and in pall', like the Lady Alice of an old ballad, nor reduced to the primitive nakedness of a modern fashionable at a rout," wrote Scott in his introduction to Waverley. "From this my choice of an era the understanding critic may farther presage that the object of my tale is more a description of men than manners."

The first Walter Scott prize will be presented as part of the Borders book festival in June, at Scott's home Abbotsford House, near Melrose, for which fundraising to restore the property is currently underway. Judges will include novelist Elizabeth Laird, journalist and author Allan Massie and literary editor of the Scotsman David Robinson.