Graeme Macrae Burnet has made it two prize nominations in as many weeks – following last Thursday’s announcement by the Walter Scott Prize – for his novel BENBECULA, as it is named among the longlist for the 2025 Highland Book Prize, awarded by the Highland Society of London and Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre.
This annual award celebrates literature that comes from the rich landscape and culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and is open to books of any genre – including fiction, non-fiction and poetry – written by authors who live in the Highlands or were born there, as well as books whose content is Highland themed. This year’s judges are poet and essayist Jen Hadfield; fiction writer Cynan Jones; and Scotland’s Makar Peter Mackay. A shortlist will be announced in May, followed by the winner in June 2026.
Also on the longlist this year are:
An Staran by Petra Johana Poncarová (Acair, Gaelic Poetry & Prose)
Drifting North by Dominic Hinde (Manchester University Press, Non-fiction)
Dwell Time by Taylor Strickland (Tapsalteerie, Poetry)
The Edge of Silence by Neil Ansell (Birlinn, Non-fiction)
Fo Fhasgadh Beinn Chianabhail by Mòrag Anna NicNèill (Acair, Gaelic Fiction)
Fower Pessoas by Colin Bramwell (Carcanet, Poetry)
The Highland Cow and the Horse of the Woods by Roy Dennis (Porto Press, Non-fiction)
Looking Down at the Stars by Christina Riley (Saraband, Non-fiction)
The Lost Elms by Mandy Haggith (Headline, Non-fiction)
Pathfinding by Kerri Andrews (Elliott and Thomson, Non-fiction)
The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson (John Murray Press, Fiction)
BENBECULA was published in the UK by Polygon and WF Howes, and in Australia by Text Publishing in October 2025; a North American edition, published by Biblioasis and Recorded Books, followed in November 2025. Spanish and Catalan editions are forthcoming from Impedimenta and crims.cat respectively.
Congratulations Graeme!
About BENBECULA
On 9 July 1857, Angus MacPhee, a labourer from Liniclate on the island of Benbecula, murdered his father, mother and aunt. At trial in Inverness he was found to be criminally insane and confined in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison.
Some years later, Angus’s older brother Malcolm recounts the events leading up to the murders while trying to keep a grip on his own sanity. Malcolm is living in isolation, ostracised by the community and haunted by this gruesome episode in his past.
From Graeme Macrae Burnet, the Booker-shortlisted author of HIS BLOODY PROJECT, comes a beguiling psychological novel set on a remote Scottish island. Based on a true story and drawing on the documentary evidence of the time, Burnet constructs a gripping narrative about madness, murder and the uncertain nature of the self.
Credit: Euan Anderson
About Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet was born in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire and now lives in Glasgow. He has also lived in the Czech Republic, France, Portugal and London.
His first novel, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ADÈLE BEDEAU (Contraband, 2014), received a New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust and was longlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award. A second Inspector Gorski novel, THE ACCIDENT ON THE A35, was published in 2017, and the trilogy was completed in 2024 with the ‘tragic, cinematic, propulsive' (Martin MacInnes) A CASE OF MATRICIDE, which won the 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best International Crime Fiction.
HIS BLOODY PROJECT (Contraband, 2015) won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and the Vrij Nederland Thriller of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the LA Times Mystery Book of the Year and the European Crime Fiction prize. It has been published in over twenty languages. CASE STUDY was published in 2021 by Saraband (UK), Text (ANZ) and Bolinda (UK audio) to wide critical acclaim. The North American edition was published in 2022 by Biblioasis. It has been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 and the Dublin Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Ned Kelly International Crime Prize. It has been published in fifteen languages.
Graeme was named Author of the Year in the 2017 Sunday Herald Culture Awards and has appeared at festivals and events in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, Russia, Estonia, Macau, Ireland, Germany, Poland and France, as well as in the UK.
Praise for BENBECULA
‘Graeme Macrae Burnet’s recreation of a macabre incident in 19th-century Hebridean history is unrelentingly disturbing and utterly gripping' – James Robertson
‘Some crime writers are successful at creating fully-formed living, breathing characters; others are more adept at playing games with the reader: to an almost unique degree, Macrae Burnet excels at both.’ – Jake Kerridge, ‘The 21 best crime and thriller novels of 2025’, The Telegraph
‘Burnet’s vivid portrayal of a troubled household by a man attempting to explain the inexplicable is dark, intense and utterly compelling.’ – Laura Wilson, ’The best recent crime and thrillers’, The Guardian
‘Reading a novel by Graeme Macrae Burnet is unnerving because the experience always becomes physical… The more compressed and oppressive and inescapable the lives of his characters become, the tighter his books are wrapped in seeming limitations, the freer you feel as a reader… The way out of the dark hell of your own mind is to imagine yourself into the minds of others. Graeme Macrae Burnet will do anything to help get you there.’ – Ian Brown, Globe and Mail
‘BENBECULA is an elegant, eerie volume… Perhaps the most impressive feature of the novella is the sense of simmering. The bare facts are not really in dispute, but the reasons and motives are deliberately opaque. Rather than any explicit cause, Macrae Burnet conjures an atmosphere of suppression.’ – Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
Visit Graeme’s website.
