Alice Jolly has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her novel The Matchbox Girl, which tells the story of Adelheid Brunner, a patient of Dr Hans Asperger in the now-infamous Vienna Children’s Hospital during the 1930s, while the city is under Nazi occupation.
Alice received her prize from Walter Scott’s great-great-great-great grandson, Matthew Maxwell Scott, at a ceremony at the Borders Book Festival on Thursday 11thJune, which was followed by a celebratory dinner at Scott’s great home of Abbotsford.
This is the first time playwright, novelist and memoirist Alice Jolly has been shortlisted for the Prize, which awards works of fiction set more than 60 years ago.
She says of writing the book: “I remain constantly troubled by that age of old question as to how people who were certainly not wholly ‘evil’ nevertheless found themselves drawn into appalling crimes. In 2018, two non-fiction books about the history of autism were published which told wildly differing stories about Dr Asperger. My book started with the simple question – who was Dr Asperger?
“However, as I worked, I began to realise that Asperger’s forgotten colleagues were perhaps more interesting than he was.
“I became obsessed with bringing them into the light and celebrating the ways in which the staff of the Curative Education Ward in Vienna struggled to hold onto their research, and their principles, despite finding themselves in the eye of the most evil storm of the twentieth century.”
he judges said: “Originality, innovation, ambition – The Matchbox Girl not only more than fulfils the judging criteria for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, it confronts a topic of immense complexity in a gripping tour de force.
“With the skill of a cubist painter, Alice Jolly has altered the angle from which events in Vienna in 1934, and particularly in the Vienna Children’s Hospital, are observed, and a story we think we know is disrupted by a heroine who is speechless yet speaks with disturbing energy.
“The Matchbox Girl may be the most unusual book you read this year. For its honesty, power and storytelling dexterity, our 2026 winner will also be one of the most important.”
The Walter Scott Prize, run by The Abbotsford Trust, is one of the UK’s major literary awards, with previous winners including Sebastian Barry, Robert Harris, Andrea Levy and Hilary Mantel.
It is open to novels published in the previous year in the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth, and set at least 60 years ago to reflect the title of Scott’s first historical novel, Waverley, or tis sixty years since.
The judging panel for this year’s Prize comprised writer Katie Grant (Chair), art historian James Holloway, children’s author Elizabeth Laird, broadcaster James Naughtie, previous Young Walter Scott Prize winner Rosi Byard-Jones, and bookshop owner Rosamund de la Hey.
