Arts / Stout ‘astounded’ to win Highland Book Prize
LOCAL writer Jen Stout has received more accolades after winning the 2024 Highland Book Prize.
She won the award for her book Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War, a first-hand account of reporting from the conflict in Ukraine.
Covering fiction, non-fiction and poetry, the Highland Book Prize celebrates the finest published work that is created in or about the Highlands and Islands.
Stout said she was “astounded” to win given the competition on the four-strong shortlist, which also featured Ali Smith, Genevieve Carver and Joni Buchanan.
“It’s very meaningful to get recognition like this, particularly a prize that’s full of writers from our part of the world,” she told Shetland News.
Stout said Shetland and the Highlands and Islands generally is regularly “heavy romanticised” and is often “written about from quite a distance, whether that’s geographic or cultural distance”.
“I think to have a prize that’s celebrating work that is the actual opposite of that is a really good thing.”
Stout added that Night Train was written in Voe, while Shetland also features in the book in terms of what it felt like to go back home after reporting in Ukraine.
She said that the “outward-looking Shetland mentality” was also central to the story.
On this year’s judging panel were poet and essayist Jen Hadfield, novelist and short fiction writer Cynan Jones and lecturer, broadcaster, and Scotland’s Makar, Peter Mackay.
Mackay said Night Train to Odesa is an “incredible book for the first-person account that she can give, for the world that she evokes”.
“It comes in a very good, long lineage of war reportage,” he added. “It felt a privilege to be taken to some of those people and places, to trace the changing rhythms of the war, and the moments of loss and re-encounter.”
Jones added that Stout “lifts a book that could so easily be about death into a book about life”.
“She bears witness bravely and unashamedly. It’s writing at the most human level, deeply moving and important.”
Meanwhile Hadfield said: “The most moving aspect of this book is that, despite harrowing first hand experiences of the invasion, misery is not the prevailing mood.
“Ukrainian trauma and suffering are more than balanced by hope, creativity, resilience and expression of identity: these are acts of resistance in the face of the surreal Russian strategy of denial.
“How she managed to write a book so celebratory in tone still astonishes me. It is written with love, care and genuine empathy.”
The winner of the Highland Book Prize is given £2,000 plus a week’s writing retreat at Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s creative writing centre.
Last year Stout also won in the First Book of the Year category at Scotland’s National Book Awards.
She was also shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s prestigious Ondaatje Prize.
Shetland News also published reports from Stout in Ukraine, including this piece from 2022 entitled All sorts of people turn up in a crisis.
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