- Judges
Stella Tillyard is a historian and writer who won the History Today Award, the Fawcett Prize, and the Meilleur Livre Etranger, for her 1994 biography of four sisters, Aristocrats, before releasing Citizen Lord (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize) and A Royal Affair. Tillyard has sat on several prize juries, mostly recently the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2010, and in 2011 she published her first novel, Tides of War.
Commenting on the 2016 shortlist, Stella said: “From a strong long-list we have chosen four books, each with a distinctive and original voice. These books are not only complete and new in themselves; they also show potential for the development of the writer and the genre. That’s a privilege and a thrill.”