Eleanor Barraclough is the Kingston based author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, that has recently been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.
Marking her second book, Embers of the Hands focuses on the everyday preciousness of life, breaking away from the typical ‘warrior’ image of the Vikings, and revealing the ordinary accounts of daily life in 750 to 1100 CE.
Barraclough’s book is also a New York Times editors’ choice and became a Times history book of the year in 2024.
Barraclough said: “I remember being an undergraduate when I was at Cambridge, and I remember after most of the language classes, I would just go and hide and cry because I felt like I was the stupidest person in the room.
“I think the teenage me who was crying every week, would be absolutely flabbergasted to have been shortlisted and absolutely delighted, and a little bit suspicious, because, well, ‘how’d that happen?’”
Barraclough expressed how grateful she was to even be shortlisted, calling English classicist and Wolfson History prize judge, Mary Beard, a huge influence in her life and the ‘absolute master’ of storytelling and communication.
Barraclough said: “This sounds cheesy, but it really is true — look at the people who, not only have won in the past, but have also been shortlisted in the past and often these are the historians that I look up to most in the world.
“The wonderful thing about the Wolfson is that if you look at all the books in the shortlist, they’re trying to find new ways of telling histories, sometimes completely unknown histories, and so many of the books in the shortlist are giving voice to the voiceless.
“So it’s a shortlist that I’m very proud to be part of.”
Eleanor studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and said she had always been fond of storytelling, writing and the past.
She said: “I’ve always been interested in the process of storytelling, and how we tell stories today, but also how people in the past told stories, and the idea of what their place in the world was and what stories they told about themselves and their ancestors.
“When I was writing, I was very aware that I wanted to replicate that sense of history as a form of storytelling, and history as a form of humanity.”
Besides books, Eleanor’s storytelling varies from magazines to newspaper articles, historical podcasts and supernatural documentaries for the BBC.
The Wolfson History Prize started in 1972 and is the most valuable history-writing prize in the UK, with the winner receiving £50,000, and the shortlisted authors receiving £5,000 each.
Over £1.5 million has been awarded to more than 140 historians in the prize’s 53-year history.
The other books and authors on the shortlist are: The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor; Multicultural Britain by Kieran Connell; Survivors by Hannah Durkin; The Gravity of Feathers by Andrew Fleming; and The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge.
The Wolfson History Prize winner 2025 will be announced on December 2nd.
Feature image credit: Wolfson History Prize
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