The novelist Hilary Mantel added another literary award to her NBCC and Booker prizes when Wolf Hall won the inaugural Walter Scott prize for historical fiction last Saturday.
Speaking to the Guardian on the telephone today, one of the judges, Allan Massie, praised Wolf Hall as "beautifully crafted", and suggested it would have been "perverse" if any of the other contenders had won.
He confessed that he and some of the other judges were uneasy about adding the £25,000 prize to the string of awards Mantel has already received.
"I would have been less concerned if this hadn't been the first Walter Scott prize," he said, "but the more I thought about it, and the more I read the other books the more it seemed that it would have been perverse not to have awarded the prize to Wolf Hall."
"It seems to me to be just about as good as a historical novel can get in the recreation of the period," he added, "but at the same it's an excellent novel of character and narrative drive, and very well constructed."
Mantel, who was unable to attend the ceremony at Walter Scott's home in Abbotsford due to illness, said she was "astonished and gratified" to win, and that she was "working very hard to write a sequel to Wolf Hall which readers will value and enjoy just as much as the first book. This prize acts as the greatest possible encouragement."
She also suggested the prize would "magnetise attention and stimulate debate" around a genre which, according to Massie, is on the up.
"There was a time when crime novels were seen as entertainment, and probably the same was true of historical fiction," he said. While it was easy to exaggerate the extent to which the historical novel declined, he said, its recent success was partly because "you find that people who are writing good historical novels are also – like Hilary Mantel herself – writing contemporary novels, and they make little distinction between them".
He also suggested that it was partly due to wider historical forces. "I'm always dubious about sociological explanations, but we're feeling uncertain about where we are today, and so we're looking back at the past to see where we've come from."
The tendency to look back at the past was one that should be resisted by literary judges, however, Massie said. He and his fellow judges – Elizabeth Buccleuch, Elizabeth Laird, David Robinson and Gavin Wallace – fought against such impulses as they tried to ignore the verdicts of previous award judges. "There's always a temptation for prize panels to choose a book that would be different," he said. "I think it should be resisted."
Having not read Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, which beat Wolf Hall to the Orange prize earlier this month, he preferred not to speculate as to whether the Orange prize jury had succumbed to temptation.
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
