We’re delighted to announce that Rachel Seiffert has been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her novel Once the Deed is Done, set in Northern Germany in 1945. The judges said, ‘Rachel Seiffert’s outstanding novel is full of feeling but without sentimentality’.

There are five books on the shortlist, all by British authors. The shortlisted titles are:

THE PRETENDER by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)
THE MATCHBOX GIRL by Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury)
BENBECULA by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Polygon)
ONCE THE DEED IS DONE by Rachel Seiffert (Virago)
SEASCRAPER by Benjamin Wood (Viking)

Spanning the centuries from the 1480s to the 1950s, the novels cover events and locations from the English Wars of the Roses to Austria and Germany during the Second World War, and a shocking true crime committed on a Hebridean island to an imagined encounter in a small community on the northwest coast.

Honouring the achievements of the founding father of the historical novel, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is one of the UK’s most prestigious literary prizes. The winner receives £25,000 and shortlisted authors each receive £1,500.  Since it was founded seventeen years ago by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, the Prize has awarded over £450,000 to writers and brought nearly 200 great novels to wider public attention. The Walter Scott Prize celebrates quality of writing in the English language, and is open to novels published in the previous year in the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth. Reflecting the subtitle ‘Tis Sixty Years Since’ of Scott’s famous work Waverley, the majority of the storyline must be set at least 60 years ago.