The architect whose year on Uist inspired sci fi novel up for £50,000 prize

Now, the sci fi novel he started while living there, inspired by the remote landscape and community, has been shortlisted for a £50,000 prize.

Six unpublished novels, including Mr Daniels’ The Last Canary, are in the running for the inaugural prize package from Libraro, which also includes a book deal with Hachette UK.

Mr Daniels said he had started looking for work after graduating from GSA in 2016.

He said: “My friends were moving down to London, which is where I thought I should go. But I was struggling to find my first job in architecture in London, so I started looking at jobs in Scotland, and this one popped up in North Uist. And I just thought, ‘what an adventure’. So I applied and they accepted me.”

With little in the way of rental properties on North Uist, Mr Daniels was put up in an old schoolhouse on Balashare, which is home to just a few dozen people.

He worked with local architect Robert Fraser, who he admits, has “made his way into the book” - as has Mr Fraser’s house, which doubled as the company’s office.

“He’s a brilliant character,” he 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.”

He added: “It was a really wild indoctrination into the profession. 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.”

It was while alone in his Balashare home after work when ideas began to form for a novel.

“I'd never really thought about being a writer up until the point I was out in Uist,” he said. “I was living on my own in the middle of nowhere, it couldn't be more remote.

“I thought, ‘what am I going to do with all this time?’ So I decided to give writing a go, and just being on the island as well, I knew that I wanted to set something there.”

The unchanging landscape served as the perfect location for Mr Daniels’ story, which sees some characters go into stasis for 400 years.

“I thought, Where is a place that would look would have looked 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.

“None of what I wrote then has made its way directly into the book 10 years later, but some of the ideas were definitely jotted down then.”

Now living in his wife’s native Czechia with their young family, Mr Daniels 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.

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.”