Booker rivals clash again on Walter Scott prize shortlist

From Robert Harris's ancient Rome in 63BC to Simon Mawer's pre-war Czechoslovakia via the cut-throat court of Henry VIII as reimagined by Hilary Mantel, the shortlist for a new literary award marking the legacy of Sir Walter Scott covers 2,000 years of history. The Walter Scott prize for historical fiction, worth £25,000, has shortlisted seven authors for its inaugural award. Mawer's The Glass Room, Mantel's Wolf Hall and Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze, about the 1840 meeting of poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson, are all in contention – the second time the authors have competed against each other after all three were shortlisted for last year's Booker prize (those laurels eventually going to Mantel). The line-up is completed with Adam Thorpe's take on the medieval legend of Robin Hood, Hodd; Sarah Dunant's Sacred Hearts, about the power struggles in a 16th century Italian convent; Iain Pears's early 20th century historical thriller, Stone's Fall; and Harris's exploration of the story of Cicero, Lustrum. The prize's definition of historical insists that the events in the novel take place at least 60 years before publication – as they do in Scott's famous Waverley: Tis Sixty Years Since – and are thus outside the author's mature personal experience. Author, historian and chair of the award's judges Alistair Moffat said that writers like Robert Harris on ancient Rome or Hilary Mantel on 1520s England were "far better at conveying what life was like than some university history lecturers". "They are giving history back its stories," he said. "The best way to understand the past is often to read a novelist rather than an historian. We need to know where we came from, what kind of people our ancestors were ... What people in the past believed – such as the absolute certainty about heaven and hell in the Middle Ages – is every bit as important in telling us what they were like as what they left behind in the historical record." Historical fiction, according to Moffat, is enjoying an unprecedented boom. "Historical fiction may have become more popular because at a time when the future seems terrifying to us, we need to refer back to and understand the past more fully," he said. Moffat is joined on the judging panel for the prize – sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Scott – by Elizabeth Laird, Allan Massie, David Robinson, Gavin Wallace and Elizabeth Buccleuch. The winner will be announced on 19 June as part of the Borders book festival, at Scott's home Abbotsford House, near Melrose. The shortlist Hodd by Adam Thorpe Lustrum by Robert Harris Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant Stone's Fall by Iain Pears The Glass Room by Simon Mawer The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel