Shortlist spotlight: Andrew Miller
8th May, 2025
Shortlisted author Andrew Miller tells us more about The Land In Winter and how he came to write it.
Q: How do you feel about being shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction? Do you consider yourself an historical novelist?
Being shortlisted? I couldn’t be more pleased. My third time. I fear I’ve drunk quite a lot of the Duke’s excellent whisky. As for being an historical novelist – I’m a writer whose work sometimes has an historical setting.
Q: How did the people and times you write about in this novel first lodge in your imagination?
Well, they came walking slowly out of a blizzard. I leaned quite heavily into the early married lives of my parents, and some of the people they knew, all of whom are long dead now. One of the few advantages of getting older is that your own past becomes material for an historical novel.
Q: What place does research have in your writing? When does the fiction take over from the facts?
I research pretty heavily, then let time take off the sharp edges. One is not, after all, cramming for an exam. When does fiction take over? Fiction is a kind of shaping, so it’s at work all the time, right from the beginning.
Q: Can writing about the past help us to deal with the present and think about the future?
One of the old understandings about literature is that it’s an aid to thought. We think (hopefully) not just more clearly but more vividly, whether that’s about the past, the present or the future. With reference specifically to historical fiction – there is something obviously important in our being reacquainted with our pasts. To have no knowledge of the past, no sense of it, no stories about it, to be a creature that swims entirely on the surface and understands nothing of the depths, would be a sort of idiocy.