Shortlist Announced for the Highland Book Prize
Titles by Genevieve Carver, Ali Smith, Jen Stout, and Joni Buchanan shortlisted for the 2024 Highland Book Prize.
This prize celebrates the wide range of literature written in or about the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and the shortlisted titles represent authors who were born in or live in the Highlands, as well as books whose content illuminates the culture, landscape, and heritage of the region.
Genevieve Carver’s “transporting, original and subversively compassionate” poetry, Birds Humans Machines Dolphins, integrates poetic and scientific processes with first-hand encounters of ecological fieldwork in Orkney and in the Moray Firth. The judges said, “The theme of ecological damage is handled powerfully, but quietly, rationally: there is a persuasive power in that quietness.”
Gliff, a freewheeling and urgent new novel by Inverness-born Ali Smith, asks what happens if we continue to embrace the divisive, isolating behaviours we’ve already begun to normalise, and was described by the judging panel as “more real than reality”.
In Night Train to Odesa, Shetland-based Jen Stout’s vivid reporting from the onset of Russia’s war on Ukraine embraces questions of identity, history, and the hopes and fears of Ukrainian people. The judges shared that, “it felt a privilege to be taken to those people, places and moments, to trace the changing rhythms of the war, and the moments of loss and re-encounter.”
Women of the Hebrides / Ban-eileanaich Innse Gall by Dr Joni Buchanan fills a long neglected gap in Hebridean history, telling the story of the island women with a wealth of detail and intensive research. This is, “a vital archive rich in historical detail, with moving stories and vibrant voices that honours island women whose role in historical and cultural events might so easily be overlooked, being ‘ordinary’ in their extraordinariness.”
Highland Book Prize 2024 Shortlist
Birds Humans Machines Dolphins, Genevieve Carver
(Poetry, Guillemot Press)
Gliff, Ali Smith
(Fiction, Hamish Hamilton)
Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Cost of Russia’s War, Jen Stout
(Non-Fiction, Birlinn)
Women of the Hebrides / Ban-eileanaich Innse Gall , Joni Buchanan
(Non-Fiction, Acair)
The shortlist was selected from a longlist of 12 by a judging panel, who are: poet and essayist Jen Hadfield; novelist and screenwriter Cynan Jones; and Peter Mackay, poet, lecturer and broadcaster, and Scotland’s current Makar. The selection process was chaired by Alex Ogilvie, a Trustee for the Highland Society of London, who present the award, and facilitated by Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre. The winning title will be announced in July 2025.