2019 Shortlist
The 2019 Highland Book Prize saw over 80 books by 50 different publishers submitted and reviewed by a panel of 105 volunteer readers comprised of industry professionals and avid readers.
We are delighted to be able to reveal the books on the shortlist for the 2019 Highland Book Prize. They are:
The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel by David Gange (William Collins)
Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie (Sort of Books)
Spring by Ali Smith (Penguin Random House)
Moder Dy by Roseanne Watt (Polygon)
The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel by David Gange, published by William Collins.
The story of a breath-taking kayak journey along the weather-ravaged coasts of Atlantic Britain and Ireland and a lyrical exploration into the ways in which wind, rock and ocean have shaped the diverse communities of coastal Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall.
Over the course of a year, leading historian and nature writer David Gange kayaked the weather-ravaged coasts of Atlantic Britain and Ireland from north to south: every cove, sound, inlet, island.
The idea was to travel slowly and close to the water, as millions did in eras when coasts were the main arteries of trade and communication, and so build a history of coastal living. Drawing on the archives of islands and coastal towns, as well as their vast poetic literatures, he shows that the neglected histories of these stunning regions are of real importance in understanding both the past and future of the whole archipelago.
The journey is one of staggering adventure, range and beauty. For too long the significance of coasts has been underestimated, and the potential of small boats as tools to make sense of their histories rarely explored. This book seeks to put that imbalance right.
Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie, published by Sort of Books
Under the ravishing light of an Alaskan sky, objects are spilling from the thawing tundra linking a Yup’ik village to its hunter-gatherer past. In the shifting sand dunes of a Scottish shoreline, impressively preserved hearths and homes of Neolithic farmers are uncovered. In a grandmother’s disordered mind, memories surface of a long-ago mining accident and a ‘mither who was kind’.
In this luminous and acclaimed new essay collection, renowned author and poet Kathleen Jamie visits archeological sites and mines her own memories – of her grandparents, of youthful travels – to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. As always she looks to the natural world for her markers and guides. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an earlier, less tethered sense of herself.
Spring by Ali Smith, published by Penguin Random House
What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?
Spring. The great connective.
With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare’s most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door.
The time we’re living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.
Moder Dy by Roseanne Watt, published by Polygon
‘The old Shetland fishermen still speak with something like reverence of the forgotten art of steering by the moder dy (mother wave), the name given to an underswell which it is said always travels in the direction of home’.
Written in English, interspersed with Shetlandic dialect throughout, this eagerly awaited debut collection from Shetland poet Roseanne Watt contains profound, assured and wilfully spare poems that are built from the sight, sound and heartbeat of the land as much as from the sea. In rigorously controlled, concise, and vivid language Watt offers glimpses of the landscape alongside which we find the most complex and mysterious of human experiences.
The Longlist
