Following swiftly on from today’s earlier announcement of its longlisting for the CWA Historical Dagger award, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s BENBECULA continues to attract further awards attention, advancing to the shortlist for this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. BENBECULA is published on Polygon’s Darkland Tales list, featuring retellings of Scottish history by some of the nation’s best authors. In the novella Graeme takes readers back to the 19th century Outer Hebrides and a pitch-black tale of murder and madness reminiscent of his own acclaimed HIS BLOODY PROJECT.
‘Thus the stage is set for Macrae Burnet’s powerful, innovative psychological novella, all the more haunting in its brevity,’ wrote the judges in their citation. ‘[BENBECULA] takes its literary lead from the early innovators of the modern novel, James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson, with a neat and clever tale that beds its roots firmly in the gothic, with themes of madness, isolation and morality at its dark heart. What happens when communities are tarred by association, and is it possible to keep the right side of madness when all around you madness abounds? BENBECULA is as far removed from the recent cosy-crime tradition as it is possible to be: this is claustrophobic crime at its very best, and with so very much to admire.’
The Walter Scott Prize celebrates works of historical fiction, published during the last calendar year, and which are set more than 60 years ago. Graeme and all the shortlisted authors are invited to read at the Borders Book Festival – held at the home of Walter Scott in Abbotsford, Melrose – on 11 June, where the winner will be announced. The winner – following recent honourees Hilary Mantel, James Robertson, Lucy Caldwell, Kevin Jared Hosein and, last year’s victor, Andrew Miller – will receive £25,000, with each shortlisted author also awarded £1,500.
Shortlisted alongside Graeme are:
THE PRETENDER by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)
THE MATCHBOX GIRL by Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury)
ONCE THE DEED IS DONE by Rachel Seiffert (Virago)
SEASCRAPER by Benjamin Wood (Viking)
BENBECULA is published in the UK by Polygon – who will release their paperback edition on 7 May – and in UK audio by WF Howes. It’s also published in Australia by Text Publishing, with a North American edition published by Biblioasis, with audio by Recorded Books. Spanish and Catalan editions are forthcoming from Impedimenta and crims.cat respectively.
Congratulations Graeme!
About BENBECULA
On 9 July 1857, Angus MacPhee, a labourer from Liniclate on the island of Benbecula, murdered his father, mother and aunt. At trial in Inverness he was found to be criminally insane and confined in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison.
Some years later, Angus’s older brother Malcolm recounts the events leading up to the murders while trying to keep a grip on his own sanity. Malcolm is living in isolation, ostracised by the community and haunted by this gruesome episode in his past.
From Graeme Macrae Burnet, the Booker-shortlisted author of HIS BLOODY PROJECT, comes a beguiling psychological novel set on a remote Scottish island. Based on a true story and drawing on the documentary evidence of the time, Burnet constructs a gripping narrative about madness, murder and the uncertain nature of the self.
About Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet was born in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire and now lives in Glasgow. He has also lived in the Czech Republic, France, Portugal and London.
His first novel, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ADÈLE BEDEAU (Contraband, 2014), received a New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust and was longlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award. A second Inspector Gorski novel, THE ACCIDENT ON THE A35, was published in 2017, and the trilogy was completed in 2024 with the ‘tragic, cinematic, propulsive' (Martin MacInnes) A CASE OF MATRICIDE, which won the 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best International Crime Fiction.
HIS BLOODY PROJECT (Contraband, 2015) won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and the Vrij Nederland Thriller of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the LA Times Mystery Book of the Year and the European Crime Fiction prize. It has been published in over twenty languages. CASE STUDY was published in 2021 by Saraband (UK), Text (ANZ) and Bolinda (UK audio) to wide critical acclaim. The North American edition was published in 2022 by Biblioasis. It has been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 and the Dublin Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Ned Kelly International Crime Prize. It has been published in fifteen languages.
Graeme was named Author of the Year in the 2017 Sunday Herald Culture Awards and has appeared at festivals and events in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, Russia, Estonia, Macau, Ireland, Germany, Poland and France, as well as in the UK.
Praise for BENBECULA
‘Graeme Macrae Burnet’s recreation of a macabre incident in 19th-century Hebridean history is unrelentingly disturbing and utterly gripping' – James Robertson
‘Some crime writers are successful at creating fully-formed living, breathing characters; others are more adept at playing games with the reader: to an almost unique degree, Macrae Burnet excels at both.’ – Jake Kerridge, ‘The 21 best crime and thriller novels of 2025’, The Telegraph
‘Burnet’s vivid portrayal of a troubled household by a man attempting to explain the inexplicable is dark, intense and utterly compelling.’ – Laura Wilson, ’The best recent crime and thrillers’, The Guardian
‘Reading a novel by Graeme Macrae Burnet is unnerving because the experience always becomes physical… The more compressed and oppressive and inescapable the lives of his characters become, the tighter his books are wrapped in seeming limitations, the freer you feel as a reader… The way out of the dark hell of your own mind is to imagine yourself into the minds of others. Graeme Macrae Burnet will do anything to help get you there.’ – Ian Brown, Globe and Mail
‘BENBECULA is an elegant, eerie volume… Perhaps the most impressive feature of the novella is the sense of simmering. The bare facts are not really in dispute, but the reasons and motives are deliberately opaque. Rather than any explicit cause, Macrae Burnet conjures an atmosphere of suppression.’ – Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
Visit Graeme’s website.
