THE WINSTON GRAHAM PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION

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LATEST NEWS:

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Full details of the 2025 award event: Business Cornwall link to prize winning event.

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WINNER 2025: Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter.

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Recognition came on June 11 for Andrew Miller, who was presented with the prestigious literary accolade at a glittering ceremony at the home of the prize, Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery in Truro. Miller’s winning novel, The Land in Winter, is set in a small village in the south west during the ‘Big Freeze’ of 1963 when Britain came to a standstill under a blanket of snow, and the world was poised between the shadow of the Second World War and the societal transformations of the mid-1960s.

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The Winston Graham Historical Prize is for novels set in the UK and Ireland at least 60 years ago with a strong sense of place; it is the result of a bequest made by Winston Graham, author of the Poldark series, to the Royal Institution of Cornwall – the charity which runs the museum.

 

The Award was first awarded in 2008 with a generous legacy in Winston Graham’s will to the Royal Institution of Cornwall in Truro, which runs the Royal Cornwall Museum (RCM) and the Courtney Library. At its inception this was awarded for a work of historical fiction set in Cornwall or the South West. However, despite very worthy winners, it was ultimately decided that restricting the prize’s reach quite as much as this was probably drawing the potential field unnecessarily narrowly.

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In 2023 the Royal Cornwall Museum decided the prize should be relaunched – still to be called The Winston Graham Prize for Historical Fiction – but now open to entries from across the nation. The main entry criterion was that it should be ‘an historical novel with a powerful sense of place’ set within the bounds of the United Kingdom. The 2024 prize was a huge success. Around 70 entries and a wonderful shortlist put together by groups of readers drawn from across Cornwall by Charlotte Hobson – chair of the Judges.

 

At the prize giving, which was held at the RCM on Friday 22nd March 2024, with a large gathering of all those involved, novelist and judge of the prize, Louis de Bernières presented the £3000 award to Benjamin Myers for his extraordinary and brilliant novel Cuddy. As Louis de Bernières said, ‘This book is atmospheric and thoroughly original, with a cast of characters spanning the centuries, at the centre of whose lives is the corpse of a saint. The writing of this book must have been an act of love, and now we know; the North of England is a holy place. Cuddy is a great book and a worthy winner.’

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​More information about the timetable for the 2026 Winston Graham prize may be found on the RCM website.