Belfast writer Lucy Caldwell wins Walter Scott fiction prize

Belfast writer Lucy Caldwell has won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction for her novel These Days.

She was announced as the winner at the Borders Book Festival which is taking place in Melrose.

She took the £25,000 top prize for her story of the aerial bombardment of her home city during World War II.

The judges of the award praised her winning work for its "pitch-perfect, engrossing narrative ringing with emotional truth".

Founded in 2009, the Walter Scott Prize has become one of Britain's most important literary awards with previous winners including Sebastian Barry, Robert Harris, Andrea Levy and Hilary Mantel.

The judges said Ms Caldwell's novel was a "a story of both great violence and great tenderness".

She immersed herself in eyewitness accounts while she was writing the book, interviewing survivors, including a 103-year-old.

"These Days felt so alive to me as I was writing it, so urgent - it didn't feel like 'history' at all, it didn't even feel like it had happened, it felt like it was happening as I wrote it," she said.

The other shortlisted novels for the award were The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan, Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris, The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry, The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane, Ancestry by Simon Mawer and I Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnambalam.