Winner of 2025 Frank Watson Book Prize Announced
Dear Members and Supporters,
The Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Guelph is delighted to announce that the 2025 Frank Watson Scottish History Book Prize has been awarded to Catriona M.M. Macdonald for her book, The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History. The prize committee is very pleased to honour Catriona alongside the past winners of this prestigious prize.
The jury's citation reads:
Catriona M.M. Macdonald's book is a captivating survey of the discipline of Scottish History as it professionalized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is an exceptionally rich and original contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the historical discipline in modern Scotland. It situates contemporary historical practices in relation to the development of important research institutions, from records repositories and libraries to universities and associations and societies, as it engages with their intellectual evolution and fragmentation through a variety of lenses. Macdonald shows how novelists and popular historians scorned by the historical establishment in their time often anticipated the interest and insights that later came from the academy. The book stands out for its importance to Scottish History as a field. It will be central to training and to scholarship for a generation and beyond.
In her book Catriona asks why Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries knew so little about their past and even less about those who controlled their history. Is the historical narrative the only legitimate medium through which the past can be made known? Are novelists and historians as far apart as convention has it? In an age when history grounds any claims to national status, these are important questions and they have implications for how Scottish history has evolved, and how Scottish identity has been understood up to the present day.
Catriona asserts that Scottish history is not simply the distillation of Scotland's past: authors shape what we know and how we judge our forebears. her book investigates who decided which Scottish voices of the past would be heard in history's pages and which would ultimately be silenced. It sketches a picture of a narrow and privileged cultural elite that responded belatedly to a more democratic age and only slowly embraced women writers and the interests of "average" Scots. Integrating historical fiction and popular histories in its appreciation of the Scottish historical imaginary, it most importantly tells the story of why, despite the interests of politicians and others, a truly British history has never emerged.
Catriona M.M. Macdonald (pictured above) was born in Glasgow, educated at the universities of St Andrews and Strathclyde, and is currently Reader in Late Modern History at the University of Glasgow. She is a former editor of the Scottish Historical Review, past president of the Scottish History Society and former Trustee, National Museums Scotland. Her book Whaur Extremes Meet was Saltire Scottish History Book of the Year, 2010.
The Frank Watson Book Prize is awarded in odd-numbered years for the best monograph, edited collection and/or book-length original work on Scottish History published in the previous two years. The prize consists of a cash award, an invitation to present a plenary lecture and permission to advertise success in the competition. It was established more than 20 years ago by Dr. Cicely Watson, a crusader for educational reform in Ontario, in memory of her husband Dr. Frank Watson. Cicely and Frank were long-time supporters of the Scottish Studies Foundation and their association with Scottish Studies at Guelph dates back to 1968.
For more information please contact:
Melissa Turner
Scottish Studies Office
MacKinnon Building, Room MCKN 1008
University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
N1G 2W1
Tel: 519-824-4120 ext 53209
Email: scottish@uoguelph.ca
I do hope you find this of interest.
Best wishes and thank you for your support.
David Hunter
President