Absolutely & Forever by UEA alumna Rose Tremain has been longlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Rose (pictured) graduated from UEA with a BA in English in 1967 and later returned to the university to teach on the Creative Writing MA and, more recently, to become the University’s first female Chancellor. She was made a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 2007. Among her many acclaimed novels are Music and Silence (1999), which won the Whitbread Novel Award, The Road Home, which won the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, and The Gustav Sonata was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, the Independent Bookshop Week Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Her previous novel Islands of Mercy was also longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2021. The 2024 Walter Scott Prize shortlist will be announced in May, and the winner in June.