War, Marriage and Folk Festivals - Essay Prize Finalists Unveiled

This year’s shortlist reflects a wide range of authors tackling a range of subjects – including some of the biggest confronting contemporary society.

The finalists are:

• A Place With a Name. Sukhada Tatke recalls the journey to marry her French husband, navigating tensions between love, bureaucracy, nationality and belonging against the backdrop of the Indian elections.

• Bield, Stephen Stewart. A former soldier who witnessed atrocities in Afghanistan explores the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder on his life, both emotional and physical.

• Borrowed Memories, Iain Houston. An exploration of the writer’s experience visiting Holocaust sites in Poland and the emotional burden of confronting historical suffering.

• Crunch, Jemma Neville. The apple tree is a symbol of care, continuity and hope. The author reflects on motherhood, childhood, migration and humanity’s relationship with nature, connecting the tree’s history to cultivation and changing climates.

• Notes on an Unfinished Memoir, HL Ronnie. After her mother was murdered during childhood, the author wrote a 50,000-word memoir hoping to find connection and catharsis. In a true-crime culture filled with media intrusion can publicly sharing a traumatic past bring healing?

• One Handful of Earth, Kenny Farquharson. A moving photo essay looking at the theme of belonging through a small-town Scottish folk festival, celebrating the traditions, music, language and community of rural north-east Scotland.

• Panning for Gold, Eve Livingston. Gold panning in Scotland is far more than a hunt for wealth: it is a pursuit that connects people with nature, adventure and one another.

• Speaking Animal. Polly Clark looks at how encounters with animals have shaped her understanding of attention, compassion, communication and writing. Her experiences range from caring for an orangutan at Edinburgh Zoo to refusing to abandon a beloved rabbit.

• The City of Disappearing Women, Viktoriia Grivina. A Ukrainian writer returns from Scotland to war-torn Kharkiv, where she searches for female literary figures who can help her understand her city and herself.

• When Did the War Begin? Esa Aldegheri. While making pancakes for her children in Scotland, the author reflects on the bombing of Lebanon’s Litani River and connects it with memories of her Italian grandfather whose life was shaped by two world wars.

With an increased number of entries this year (70% from women), the list features established and emerging talents from the worlds of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and journalism.

Wigtown Festival Company’s CEO, Isla Rosser-Owen, said: “A good essay invites us to go beyond the familiar and opens doors onto lives, places and moments while encouraging us to see the world differently. The exceptional standard of this year’s shortlist, and the range of ideas they explore, makes the judges’ task of selecting a winner a difficult, though deeply rewarding, one.

“I would like to thank all our entrants to this year’s competition. It has been an absolute pleasure to have been involved in selecting the shortlist.”

This year’s judges are poet, essayist and critic Gerry Cambridge and journalist, presenter and writer Zara Janjua.

Wigtown Festival Company’s CEO, Isla Rosser-Owen, also joined the judges to facilitate the initial shortlisting of entries.

Zara said: “It’s been a real privilege to judge the Anne Brown Essay Prize. There’s something wonderfully intimate about being handed someone’s thoughts and being trusted to follow wherever they take you. The best essays don’t simply tell you something you didn’t know; they make you look again at something you thought you did.

“As a journalist and writer, I spend so much of my life thinking about how we tell stories, but judging this prize has reminded me that great writing isn’t always about having the biggest story. Sometimes it’s about noticing the smallest thing and finding something universal inside it.

“I’ve loved the range of voices, subjects and ideas in this year’s entries, and particularly the freedom of a prize that essentially says: tell us what fascinates you and make us care about it too. Anne Brown spent her life championing journalism, writing and new voices, and it feels very special to play a small part in continuing that.”

Gerry added: “The most recent root of the word ‘Essay’, is French, ‘essayer’, ’to attempt’ or ’to try’, from the originator of this literary form, Michel de Montaigne in the late 16th century.

“That definition, though, in these shortlisted Wigtown essays points more to the exploratory nature of the form than the potential failure also implicit in ‘attempt’.

“It is terrific to see the Wigtown Festival Company, notable for its adventurous and at times courageous programming, encourage the art of the essay; and an honour personally to get to read, writing which encompasses everything from the extremities of fighting in Afghanistan and other foreign conflicts, family tragedy, or the Holocaust, to the gentler realities of Scottish ‘diddling’ - traditional mouth music - or the hope ‘ramifying endlessly’, as Philip Larkin would have had it, in contemplating a variety of apple.”

Commemorating Anne Brown

The prize commemorates Anne Brown (1942-2021), former chair of Wigtown Festival Company, who was also a BBC radio journalist and senior producer.

Now in its fifth year, previous winners are Sarah Whiteside, Rodge Glass, Dani Garavelli, and Tamara Fulcher. The winning essay will be published on the Wigtown Book Festival website and also on The Herald newspaper website, with an excerpt appearing in the print edition.

Precision, originality and curiosity

• The Anne Brown Essay Prize is organised by Wigtown Festival Company in association with The Herald.

• The prize is made possible thanks to the generous support of Anne Brown’s daughter Jo Lawrence and her son Richard Brown.

• It celebrates the best recent literary essay by a writer in, from or with a long-standing connection to Scotland.

• It rewards precise writing, original thinking, curiosity and creative approaches to non-fiction.

• Entries can be on any subject and the maximum length is 4,000 words.