The shortlist for this year’s Winston Graham Historical Prize – Cornwall’s answer to The Booker – was announced earlier today.
The shortlisted novels are:
The Two Roberts by Damian Barr (Canongate)
Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber)
The Pretender by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Penguin Random House)
Time of the Child by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)
I’m thrilled to be a member of this year’s judging panel alongside Chair of the Judges award-winning writer Charlotte Hobson, distinguished academic and Winston Graham’s daughter-in-law Peggotty Graham, authors Wyl Menmuir and Patrick Gale, and editor and arts administrator Sravya Raju.
The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony at the beautiful Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery in Truro on 12th March 2026 with Hotel Tresanton in St Mawes generously sponsoring accommodation for visiting authors and judges. You can read more about the Prize, the shortlisted novels and their authors below.
The Winston Graham Historical Prize
The prize celebrates the best new historical fiction with a powerful sense of place published in the past year; to enter novels must be set at least 60 years ago in the UK and Ireland.
This quest to reveal atmospheric new windows onto the past is the legacy of Winston Graham, author of the Poldark novels, which painted an unforgettable picture of 19th century Cornwall through the lives of Ross, Demelza and co. Creation of the annual shortlist is carried out by readers’ groups across Cornwall who, via their local library, are provided with entries and tasked to report back.
Cornwall Museum’s Co-Director Jonathan Morton commented: “We’re proud of Winston Graham’s connection with the museum and always enjoy the prize ceremony and the anticipation it brings. We’re also now using Graham’s legacy to inspire young writers with Winston’s Wordsmiths, a creative writing prize for children aged 8-16. This year’s winners will be announced at Waterstones in Truro on the same day as the adults’ prize, so do look out for the names of emerging writers to watch!”
The shortlisted novels and their authors
The Two Roberts begins in Glasgow in the 1930s and is inspired by the lives of two nearly-forgotten artists, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. Locked in a lifelong passion for each other and art, Barr charts their course to Paris, Rome and then London, where they mixed with the likes of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas and Wyndham Lewis as the bombs begin to fall and their lives become increasingly hedonistic as artistic success arrives and rapidly departs.
Damien Barr is an award-winning writer and columnist, who writes regularly for The Big Issue amongst others and often appears on BBC Radio 4. Maggie & Me, his memoir about coming of age and coming out in Thatcher’s Britain, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Memoir of the Year. Barr’s first novel, You Will Be Safe Here, was published in 2019, The Two Roberts is his second.
Main character energy in Helm is firmly in the hands of a ferocious and mischievous wind, a unique force which has been living alongside humans for time immemorial. From neolithic roots, through the dark ages and into the Victorian Era, Helm symbolises the co-dependency of man and nature, but now that all may be about to change according to the novel’s second protagonist, Dr Selima Sutar. Is human pollution killing Helm, and what can be done to stop it?
Sarah Hall is an acclaimed author with seven multi award-winning novels under her belt, including two that were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her short story collections have won the BBC National Short Story Award twice, first with Mrs Fox in 2013 and then again in 2020 with The Grotesques. Hall is currently involved in a “Human Written” campaign to raise public awareness about AI and protect writers and their work.
Inspired by a footnote to history—the true story of the little known Simnel, who was a figurehead of the 1487 Yorkist rebellion and ended up working as a spy in the court of King Henry VII— The Pretender is a gripping and poignant portrait of an innocent caught up in power struggles for the English throne, with a cast of unforgettable heroes and villains drawn from 15th century England.
Jo Harkin’s first novel, Tell Me An Ending, was a New York Times Book of the Year, but The Pretender is her first historical novel. She said she is very much inspired by the great Hilary Mantel’s approach to writing historical fiction, in which anything recorded as historical fact she didn’t depart from, but the grey areas were where a novelist could step into character and run with it.
Though set in Northern England in the 1960s, Seascraper is described by critics as timeless – a moving portrayal of human nature and a celebration of the power of music. The setting is notably cinematic, as the bleak and foggy coast where the protagonist Thomas collects shrimp for a living emerges and recedes across the pages of the novel. Thomas is offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change his back-breaking existence by an exotic stranger, but where will the chance take him?
Seascraper is Benjamin Wood’s fifth novel. It won the 2026 Nero Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. His previous works have been shortlisted for, amongst other things, the Costa First Novel Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Seascraper was inspired by Wood’s childhood memories of Southport Beach, where an industry of shrimpers used to thrive.
Time of the Child by Niall Williams takes us to rural Ireland in the 1960s during advent season. As the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter’s lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.
Born in Dublin where he studied English and French Literature at University College, Niall moved to New York after graduating before he and his wife Christine Breen returned to Ireland to live in Niall’s grandfather’s cottage in West Clare. Both writers, they published four books together about their lives in Ireland, before Niall moved onto plays and then novels. His first, Four Letters of Love, went on to become an international bestseller and was re-issued in 2016 as a Picador Modern Classic. Time of the Child is his 10th novel.
Have you read any of the novels on the shortlist?
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