FOUR books from Australia are among the contenders for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, with the announcement coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth. The longlist has 11 books in contention for the £25,000 and was revealed yesterday. Two of the Australian books are not yet published in the UK. Settings of the books on the list range from Tudor, Victorian and Edwardian England to Borneo, Tasmania, Indonesia, Japan, the US, Russia and East Africa. The 2021 prize was open to books published in the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth during 2020. Those in the running include Hinton by Mark Blacklock, The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte, and The Mirror And The Light by Hilary Mantel. The judges said: “Historical fiction has not obeyed any lockdown. Instead, in this year’s new publishing, there has been an explosion of lively ideas and fresh ways of storytelling, with traditional notions of historical fiction stretched and tested.