Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 19th Jun, 2025
7:00pm - 8:00pm
Highland Book Prize Longlist Event: Clear
1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger’s intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them.
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies’s intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.
In this special online event, Carys will be in discussion with Cynan Jones, writer and panelist on this year’s Highand Book Prize judging team. The event will include readings from the book and discussion, and there will be a short Q&A with the audience.
This event is part of a series celebrating the Highland Book Prize 2024 Longlist, supported by the William Grant Foundation. You can read more about the longlist here.
Carys Davies is the author of three novels, The Mission House (Granta, 2020), West (Granta, 2018) which won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction award, was Runner-Up for the Society of Author’s McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and Clear (Granta 2025), which has been longlisted for the Highland Book Prize and the Saltire Awards, and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her short stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and have won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s V S Pritchett Prize, and a Northern Writers’ Award. Davies’ second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award 2015.
Cynan Jones is an acclaimed fiction writer from the west coast of Wales, and a member of the Highland Book Prize Judging Panel. His work has appeared in over twenty countries, and in journals and magazines including Granta, Freeman’s and The New Yorker. He has also written a screenplay for the hit crime drama Hinterland, a collection of tales for children, and a number of stories for BBC Radio. He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous awards, and won, among other prizes, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award, and the BBC National Short Story Award.
Fees
We are running this as a ‘pay as you can’ event. Please see our booking options below. By paying our standard price wherever possible you help us give people on lower incomes more opportunities to attend, thank you.
We have a limited number of free places for this event, if these are showing as not available and you need a free place to be able to access the event, please email a request to us on online@moniackmhor.org.uk, thank you.
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