We are delighted to share the lovely news that The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History by Catriona M.M. Macdonald is the winner of the 2025 Frank Watson Book Prize for Scottish History, administered by the University of Guelph. The announcement is now live on their website here.

This 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.

The jury’s citation reads:

Catriona M.M. Macdonald’s book The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History, 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.

A massive congratulations to Catriona for this recognition of her work. It is a much deserved accolade for this richly fascinating study of Scottish history.