Alice Jolly wins the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for The Matchbox Girl
Alice Jolly's The Matchbox Girl, set in 1930s Vienna, has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
Alice Jolly has won the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her novel The Matchbox Girl. The £25,000 prize was announced at the Borders Book Festival on Thursday 11 June 2026. It was the first time Jolly had been in contention for the award.
The novel follows Adelheid Brunner, a patient of Dr Hans Asperger at the children's hospital in Vienna in the 1930s. Jolly is a playwright, novelist and memoirist.
The prize is run by the Abbotsford Trust and is open to novels set at least sixty years before their publication.
Why it matters: the result follows a year in which Andrew Miller won with a novel set in 1960s England, and shows the prize continuing to reward books that approach well-documented periods from an unfamiliar angle. For novelists working on difficult or much-examined history, it is a reminder that the choice of viewpoint can matter as much as the choice of subject.
Sources: Walter Scott Prize: the 2026 prize; Border Telegraph: Walter Scott Prize 2026 winner revealed.