The literary world just announced its latest shortlist of five authors for a prestigious historical fiction prize. The press release is predictably glowing. It talks about "meticulous research," "vivid world-building," and "bringing the past to life."
It is a lie.
Most historical fiction prizes don't celebrate history. They celebrate modern sensibilities dressed in corsets and doublets. They reward authors who perform a kind of chronological colonialism—planting 21st-century morality into the minds of 16th-century peasants. We are currently drowning in a sea of "safe" historical narratives that serve as little more than comfort food for the modern ego.
The Research Fetish vs. The Psychological Truth
Every time a new shortlist drops, the conversation centers on how many months the author spent in the British Library or how they tracked down the exact thread count of a Victorian waistcoat. This is a distraction.
Accuracy is not truth.
You can get every date, button, and street name right and still produce a work of historical fiction that is fundamentally dishonest. The industry has fallen in love with "material accuracy" because it’s easy to quantify and easy to market. It is much harder to capture the alien nature of the past.
True history is uncomfortable. People in the 1700s didn't think like you. They didn't value what you value. They had different concepts of time, divinity, and the self. When a prize committee selects a book where a medieval protagonist happens to hold perfectly progressive views on gender and individual autonomy, they aren't honoring history. They are validating the reader’s present-day worldview.
I’ve seen dozens of these manuscripts before they hit the shelves. The editorial notes almost always lean toward "likability." But "likable" characters in a historical context are usually anachronisms. If your 14th-century knight isn't a terrifying religious zealot with views that would get him canceled in five seconds today, you aren't writing a 14th-century knight. You’re writing a guy from Brooklyn at a Renaissance Faire.
The Five-Author Shell Game
The current shortlist of five authors is a perfect snapshot of the industry's risk-aversion. Look at the themes. You’ll likely see a "hidden woman of history," a "forgotten tragedy," and perhaps a "sweeping wartime romance."
These have become templates. The "hidden history" trope, in particular, has become a massive crutch. While uncovering marginalized voices is vital work for actual historians, fiction writers often use it as a shortcut to moral clarity. By focusing on the outsider, the author avoids the harder task: making the reader empathize with a world that is fundamentally "other."
We have traded the "Great Man" theory of history for the "Relatable Underdog" theory. Both are equally reductive. The former ignores the masses; the latter ignores the reality of social structures.
Why the "Well-Researched" Label is a Red Flag
When you see a book marketed heavily on its research, be skeptical. Excessive research often acts as a prosthetic for a lack of imagination.
In my years reviewing historical manuscripts, the "over-researched" book is easy to spot. It stops the narrative every three pages to explain how a tallow candle is made. This is "info-dumping" masquerading as authority.
The best historical fiction—the kind that rarely wins these tidy little prizes—uses history as a springboard, not a cage. Consider how Hilary Mantel handled Thomas Cromwell. She didn’t just give us the Tudor court; she gave us the smell of the power and the specific, cold logic of a man who saw the world as a series of ledgers. She didn't try to make him a "good guy" by modern standards. She made him a man of his time, which is far more terrifying and brilliant.
The Prize Industry is a Marketing Cul-de-Sac
Literary prizes are not meritocracies. They are branding exercises designed to help bookstores know what to put on the "Buy One, Get One Half Price" table.
By narrowing the field to five "safe" choices, these committees ensure that the genre remains stagnant. They favor books that are "cinematic"—a code word for "ready for a Netflix adaptation." This push for visual storytelling further erodes the internal life of historical characters. We see what they wear, but we never truly feel the weight of their superstitions or the specific pressure of their social obligations.
The Problem with "Authentic Voice"
The industry is obsessed with "authenticity," but it’s a performative version.
- Dialogue: Modern readers hate actual historical dialogue. It’s too dense, too formal, or too slang-heavy in ways we no longer understand. So, authors settle for "period-lite"—adding a few "hath"s and "anon"s while keeping the sentence structure firmly rooted in the 2020s.
- Pacing: Real life in the past was agonizingly slow or brutally fast. Fiction prizes reward a steady, three-act structure that simply didn't exist in the lived experience of the past.
- Moral Arc: We demand that our historical protagonists "learn and grow" in ways that align with modern therapy culture.
Stop Reading for Comfort
If you are picking up the latest prize-winner to feel good about how far we’ve come, you are doing it wrong. The point of historical fiction should be to shatter your certainty. It should make you realize that your "enlightened" views are just as much a product of your time as a Victorian’s views on empire were a product of theirs.
The five authors on this shortlist are likely talented. Their prose is probably elegant. But ask yourself: Does this book challenge me, or does it just decorate my current beliefs with old-fashioned wallpaper?
We need fewer "sweeping epics" and more claustrophobic, weird, and truly alien accounts of the past. We need authors who are brave enough to let their characters be wrong. We need readers who don't need a protagonist to be a "hero" to find them interesting.
The Hard Truth for Aspiring Authors
If you’re writing historical fiction to win one of these prizes, you’re already failing the history. You are writing for a committee of middle-class judges in London or New York. You are polishing the edges of the past until it’s smooth enough to swallow without choking.
Burn the research notes if they are making you stiff. Stop trying to prove you did the work. The work should be invisible.
How to Actually Write the Past
- Embrace the Taboo: Write about the things that made people of that era feel safe, even if those things make us feel disgusted.
- Kill the Modern Narrator: Stop letting your 21st-century perspective wink at the reader from behind the curtain.
- Reject the "Strong Female Lead" Archetype: Instead, write a woman who navigated the specific, crushing limitations of her time with the tools she actually had, not the tools she would have had if she’d read a feminist manifesto 300 years before it was written.
The literary establishment will keep handing out trophies for books that treat history like a costume drama. They will keep praising the "meticulous" and the "vivid." But the real history is out there—messy, illogical, and completely indifferent to your modern sensibilities.
Stop looking for yourself in the past. You aren't there. That's the whole point.
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