A Year in Isolation

Ben Daniels spent a year living in a remote school house on an island off North Uist. The location, Balashare, is connected to the main island by a causeway and home to just a few dozen people. During his stay, he was given the opportunity to live in an old schoolhouse while working as an architect for the only architecture firm on North Uist.

At the time, Ben was a young graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. He had started looking for work after graduating in 2016, but found it difficult to secure a position in London, where many of his friends were moving. Instead, he began exploring job opportunities in Scotland and eventually found a position in North Uist.

“I thought, ‘what an adventure’,” he said. “So I applied and they accepted me.”

With limited rental properties available on the island, Ben was put up in the old schoolhouse. He worked alongside local architect Robert Fraser, who has since made his way into the book. In fact, Robert’s house doubled as the company’s office.

“He’s a brilliant character,” Ben said. “He hasn’t read the book yet, but he said he is going to now. I'm expecting an email from him at some point: ‘I don't look like that. I don't act like that’. The architect is the dad of the main female lead and he does have an heroic part to play in the story.”

The Beginnings of a Sci-Fi Novel

Living in isolation on the island gave Ben the time and inspiration to start writing. It was during this period that he began working on a sci-fi novel, inspired by the remote landscape and community.

“It was a really wild indoctrination into the profession,” he said. “It was the only practice on North Uist, so we did a bit of everything from house extensions to extensions for the galleries on the island and museums and even a community gardens.”

The unchanging landscape of the island served as the perfect setting for his story, which features characters entering stasis for 400 years.

“I thought, Where is a place that would look exactly the same 500 years ago, and would look exactly the same in another 500 years? There are parts of the island where, if you're away from a road or a house, it looks totally ancient.”

While none of what he wrote then has made its way directly into the book 10 years later, some of the ideas were definitely jotted down then.

A New Chapter

Now living in his wife’s native Czechia with their young family, Ben has plans for the next book in the series. “This book is one of three inter-related books in the same world, but so I have ideas for what I would do next, but it’s carving out the time to do it,” he said.

The novel, titled The Last Canary, has been shortlisted for a £50,000 prize. Six unpublished novels, including Mr Daniels’ work, are in the running for the inaugural prize package from Libraro, which also includes a book deal with Hachette UK.

Chocolat author Joanne Harris, who is chairing the judging panel for the prize, said: “We’re seeing in real time the power that readers have, whether that’s to create bestsellers or social media phenomena as part of the new frontier of publishing. The breadth of genres on the shortlist show that what readers truly care about is a good story. I’m so looking forward to diving into these stories with my fellow judges to find the inaugural winner of The Libraro Prize.”