We have received the sad news that Audrey Salkeld died on October 11th.
Audrey was awarded the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature in 1996 for her book A Portrait of Lena Riefenstahl and we were privileged to have her as Chair of Judges in 2014.
Audrey was made an Honorary Member of the Alpine Club in recognition of her enormous contribution to mountaineering journalism, literature and film.
Read Ed Douglas' obituary is here.
The Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature continues to attract a substantial degree of interest and level of entries. In this our Fortieth Anniversary Year, there were 21 entries, with authors from Great Britain, Bulgaria, the USA and Nepal.
The Award will be made at the Boardman Tasker Shortlisted Authors and Awards event at the
Kendal Mountain Festival on Friday 17th November 2023.
Tickets available here.
The judges for 2023 are Matt Fry (Chair), Joanna Croston and Paul Pritchard. They have selected the following five books for this year’s shortlist:
Octopus Press
With a narrative that focuses on an often-overlooked aspect of climbing literature, Sherpa takes us on a beguiling journey into the culture, folklore and of survival of the native people that live in the high Himalayas. These are the people that have helped so many Western expeditions scale the highest peaks in the world, enabling the experiences that have shaped mountaineering history. This book tells the story of the Sherpas in their own words and, in a timely statement, also gives us a glimpse into the melting world that they live and work in – a world being rapidly and irreparably altered by changing climate.
Pradeep Bashyal is a BBC journalist based in Kathmandu. He has been covering mountains and mountaineering for nearly a decade. His works have also appeared in Nepal Magazine, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, Asian Geographic, National Geographic, The Diplomat, among others. After this book, in his to-dos are making a documentary on his toddler son and recording a song with Ankit. But no one has ever heard him sing. He tweets @pdpbasyal
Ankit Babu Adhikari is a writer and social science researcher based in Kathmandu. He has worked with national dailies, including The Kathmandu Post and The Himalayan Times. His works have also appeared in The Washington Post and Asian Geographic. If you google him, you may come across some strange feeds to songs and profiles featuring 'Ankit Babu Adhikari'. Don't get confused, it's the same person. He rarely tweets @AnkitAdhikari01
Mountaineers Books
A compelling, raw and honest memoir from one of the most successful climbers of her generation. Brown’s bold book gives us a no-holds barred insight into her early life, her struggles with mental health and eating disorders, all against the backdrop of her meteoric rise to climbing fame as a teenager in the mid-90s. The question of ‘what happened?’ is constant and fascinating theme throughout this unforgettable read and shows how climbing can provide escapism in its rawest form.
Recognized as one of the greatest female rock climbers in history, Katie Brown began climbing at age 12 and soon dominated national and international competitions. She mastered the discipline of climbing hard outdoor sport routes quickly, often on the first try. Retired from climbing, Brown is a writer and mom. Find her on Instagram @katiebrownclimbs.
Polygon Books
Drawing on the work of Nan Shepherd and her classic, The Living Mountain, is not an undertaking to be taken lightly and Glover doesn’t disappoint in this beautifully written and well-researched journey through the Cairngorms. Intertwining her own personal experiences of the mountains with Shepherd’s own observations, this book is an ode to the unique landscape and a valuable addition to mountain literature.
Merryn Glover was born in a former Rana palace in Kathmandu and grew up in Nepal, India and Pakistan. Her first major work was a stage play, The Long Way Home, which was broadcast on Radio Scotland. She has written three further radio plays for Radio 4 and Radio Scotland. Merryn’s first novel, A House Called Askival (2014), was published by Freight. Her second, Of Stone and Sky (2021) was published by Polygon and is set in the Highlands where she now lives. In 2019, she was appointed the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park.
Headline
Without doubt, Leo Houlding is one of the world’s foremost current climbers. There is barely a feat of adventure or endurance that he hasn’t tackled. Leo started climbing at ten years of age in the Lake District and was the youngest person (and first Briton) to free climb El Capitan. This dynamic, honest and, at times, harrowing book goes the extra mile – teaching us all about the pressures of balancing a life lived in pursuit of exhilaration but also one’s own adventure, whatever that may be.
Leo Houlding started climbing in the Lake District as a boy, rapidly rising to become the UK's most daring climber whilst still in his teens, before taking on jaw dropping ascents and epic expeditions to the most impressive and remote rock summits on the planet - from the Amazon to Antarctica, El Capitan to Everest. As well as being a world-class climber, alpinist and adventurer, he is also a filmmaker and popular public speaker.
Little Peak Press
In this truly unique and thoroughly engaging short book, we are taken on a dream-like and wintry tour of F.S. Smythe’s original 1942 work, British Mountaineers. Latham uses the processes of erasure, curation and collage to create a reframed look at a classic text in an exciting, contemporary form. This is a thoughtful artwork as much as it is a meditation on climbing history.
Faye Latham is a writer, visual poet and rock climber based in Snowdonia and London. She completed an English degree at the University of Bristol in 2018 and a Masters in History of Art in 2019. In January 2020 she was awarded the Literature Wales Bursary for Writers Under 25 to support the development of her poetry, which resulted in her work being published in various literary journals and online magazines including UKClimbing, Lumin Journal, the CTC Rewilding Anthology and the Cambridge Literary Review. In 2021 she was awarded a grant with the Society of Authors and her pamphlet Ruin/Nation was highly commended in the Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. British Mountaineers is her first poetry collection.
Once again the Award continues to attract a high level of interest and entries on a variety of aspects of the mountain environment.
Steve Dean
Secretary
Boardman Tasker Charitable Trust
The 2023 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature is supported by Mountain Equipment
Mountain Equipment is proud to be associated with the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, one of the most prestigious and respected international literary awards, and we’re delighted to be able to officially support it.
Entries are now closed for the 2023 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, with 21 books from around the world submitted.
A shortlist is anticipated at the end of August.
You can view the submissions here.
The 2024 Award opens 1st January 2024.
You can hear Peter Boardman talking about Cornices during this programme, hosted by Cerys Mathews at about 10mins into the programme, together with others and including our very own BT SLA event interviewer Stephen Venables on Antarctica.
Paul Tasker spoke about his brother and his mountaineering career in this interview with Gary Philipson on Radio Tees.
I grew up admiring the books of Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker. Many of the mountain literature texts which won the BT prize over the years were formative in my interests as a (very amateur) climber but also as a writer. I never dreamed that my own work would join that list one day. I’m thrilled that ‘A Line Above The Sky’ has received this honour from judges who I admire. In fact, as a former judge of the prize myself, I know exactly how much work and care goes into the process and how difficult it is to make decisions, so my gratitude is doubled. The prize is instrumental in expanding our sense of what ‘mountain literature’ can be and this year’s shortlist reflected the diversity of work being published - I was proud to be amongst all the authors, especially Anna Fleming who I’ve been on tour with this year talking about gender and climbing. The award creates a real sense of community and fellowship I think. It’s exciting!
Three years ago I was struggling to start writing, trying to define my audience and quite simply what my book was going to be about. The idea of a ’time capsule’ emerged by revisiting a period in the seventies and eighties which perhaps was the golden age of Himalayan mountaineering. Many of my friends had died as we changed the style of Greater Range mountaineering from Heavyweight Expeditions to faster and lighter Alpine style. Just to talk about climbing would not do the characters justice and I also wanted to illustrate the counter culture in which we lived at that time. Eventually I developed a concept to speak about a generation of climbers through the voices of those that can no longer speak.
As a relative novice to writing a book I was overwhelmed by the size of the project. But I attended the Banff Mountain and Wilderness Writing program in 2019. This brilliant course gave me confidence, empowering me to forge ahead with my memoir. As the pages started to accumulate I was in a world of my own, unlocking my memories through diaries, photographs, books, articles and crucially talking to friends. I was writing the book for myself, without a care that anyone would actually read it. Of course I wrote too much and it was only when Robert Davidson of my publishers, Sandstone Press started editing, that 'High Risk: Climbing to Extinction' started to read like a proper book. The notion of entering it into the Boardman Tasker Mountain Literature Award was far beyond reality. When I was one of six shortlisted out of forty entries I was amazed. Had the book done justice to the memory of my friends who where no longer with us? I had no reference point as to whether my book was good or bad. One chapter focused on Joe Tasker and I was paranoid that my writing would not reflect his stature as one of the worlds top mountaineers. Soon my climbing friends started giving me positive feedback, which swaged my fears. Obviously I was elated to be the joint winner of the 2022 Award and the enormity of the accolade has still not sunk in.
l-r: Helen Mort, Brian Hall, Paul Pritchard, Kieran Cunningham, Anna Fleming, Robert Charles Lee, Stephen Venables and Paul Tasker
Hello, my name is Marni Jackson and I’m talking to you from Toronto, Canada. There are no mountains here, which is one reason why I loved escaping into the books submitted to the Boardman Tasker Award this year – all forty of them, piling up like a small mountain of words in one corner of my office.
And now there are six.
I would like thank every author for the experiences they’ve shared on the page – for their generosity. I also want to thank my fellow jury members, Matt Fry and Natalie Berry, for being such good companions on this reading expedition. Together, sometimes wearing only pyjamas, we managed to climb K2 in winter, traverse the Black Cuillin (hope I’m pronouncing that right) do a few gritty routes on Stanage, and dangle upside down in a blue crevasse – all without leaving the house.
But NOT climbing turns out to have its risks as well. Kieran Cunningham has written a highly engaging account of how he spent the pandemic in the Italian alps, in lockdown, forbidden to climb his favourite peaks—and what that did to his mental health. Climbing the Walls is a reminder of the healing power of mountains and why they matter.
And I didn’t know that risk could be measured until I read Through Dangerous Doors by Robert Charles Lee, a retired risk scientist who went from adventuring with psychedelics to climbing on rock and ice, often with his equally adventurous partner Linda. Compulsively candid, Lee has written an unfiltered, unpredictable memoir that’s a pleasure to read.
Time on Rock by Anna Fleming captures the intimate relationship between climber and rock, whether it’s the gritstone of the Peak District or the granite of the Cairngorms. Her elegant, muscular writing puts us right there on the route with her, creating a peripatetic meditation on how “we shape the rock and the rock shapes us”.
Having won the Boardman Tasker prize previously for Deep Play, with his new book Paul Pritchard has gone even deeper into the spiritual rewards of a life in the mountains. After Paul was almost killed by a falling rock while climbing in Tasmania, he had to push through new physical limitations to arrive at insights that have changed his life. The Mountain Path is a devastatingly honest and inspirational account of choosing to live. It’s also great fun to read.
I think Natalie and Matt would agree that every book on our short list expands the boundaries of mountain literature. This is especially true of A Line Above The Sky, in which the poet Helen Mort draws a line between the risks and terrors of new motherhood and a more untethered life in the mountains. Freedom vs. family – that is the crux where many turn back. Shadowing the story of Alison Hargreaves, who refused to give up alpinism when she became a mother, Helen brilliantly captures the soul-forging power of two extreme experiences—climbing mountains and giving birth.
While Helen writes about women in the mountains, Brian Hall tells the story of eleven remarkable mountain-addicted men. Brian grew up with the radical climbers who would come to define a wild and glorious chapter of mountaineering in the nineteen seventies and eighties. He partied with them, climbed with them and grieved them. Full of humour, affection and respect, High Risk: Climbing to Extinction takes the reader to the heart and soul of the golden age of UK climbing.
And now we come to the announcement you’ve been waiting for...
This year, in an unanimous decision, the jury also took a risk and drew a line. The 2022 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature goes to both Brian Hall, for High Risk: Climbing to Extinction and to Helen Mort for A Line Above The Sky. Congratulations to the winners, greetings from Canada and I hope you all enjoy the celebrations tonight. Thank you.
The 2022 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature goes to both Brian Hall, for High Risk: Climbing to Extinction and to Helen Mort for A Line Above The Sky.
Congratulations to the winners!
Brian Hall grew up with the radical climbers who would come to define a wild and glorious chapter of Himalayan mountaineering in the late nineteen seventies and eighties. He partied with them, climbed with them, and grieved many of the eleven unforgettable climbers portrayed in his book. High Risk takes the reader right to the heart and soul of the golden age of UK climbing.
Climbing exploits worldwide led Brian Hall to become an internationally certified mountain guide who provides extreme location safety and rigging for the film industry. His numerous credits include the BAFTA award-winning film Touching the Void. Between 1980 and 2008, he co-directed the Kendal Mountain Film Festival of which he is a founder. Brian and his wife, Louise, divide their time between the UK’s Peak District and New Zealand’s Southern Alps.
One of Britain’s best young poets draws a line between the risks and terrors of motherhood and an untethered life in the mountains. Shadowing the life of Alison Hargreaves, the pioneering UK climber who did not give up alpinism when she became a mother, Helen Mort brilliantly explores the visceral education that is part of climbing mountains, and giving birth.
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. Her first collection, Division Street (2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Poetry Award, and won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she was named as a 'Next Generation Poet', the prestigious accolade announced only once every ten years, recognising the 20 most exciting new poets from the UK and Ireland. No Map Could Show Them (2016), her second collection, about women and mountaineering, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Helen has been the Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence and the Derbyshire Poet Laureate and was named one of the RSL's 40 under 40 Fellows in 2018. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield. Black Car Burning was her first novel, and A Line Above the Sky is her first work of narrative memoir.
If you missed the Award Ceremony - you can watch it on Kendal Mountain Player from Saturday 19 November.
The Chair Of Judges’ speech by Marni Jackson is available to read here.
Boardman Tasker Award 2019
© Henry Iddon
Festival Opening Night 2015
Back in 2015, Kendal Mountain Festival had its grand opening in the high street. We had a huge pop-up screen set up right in front of the Town Hall. Hundreds of people were gathered, kids on foam mats at the front, and row upon row of expectant faces receding into the gloom as the music pumped and the excitement mounted.
It was my role as presenter and “Face of the Fest” to get up on stage and kick the whole show off. I’d always have butterflies as the trailer played and I got ready to set the tone for the Festival. That year, the sound feed for the very first film dropped out, so I had to jump back up on stage and ad-lib while the tech crew worked their magic. I talked utter nonsense: my recent climbing trip to Kalymnos, the cut of my trousers, my favourite type of bouldering moves… it seemed like an age but was probably only a couple of minutes.
Coming off stage, Festival Director Steve Scott came up to me and said “What on earth was that bollocks you were spouting? It was brilliant. Janet Dean from the BT asks if you can do something for the Boardman Tasker next year”. And the rest (to use a cliché that’s as well-worn as the routes above the Catwalk at Malham) is history.
The brief from the Boardman Tasker team was pretty broad – just get everyone relaxed – the short-listed authors, the judges, Steve Venables (yes - even the Central Scrutiniser can get stage butterflies) and above all the audience. One of my guiding principles of presenting is to get plenty of audience interaction and I’ve been lucky to know some of the protagonists personally. Sir Chris B is always there, as is Dennis Gray. Graham Desroy was chief judge one year, and shortlisted authors have included my friends Mick Fowler, Nick Bullock and Victor Saunders. Tony Howard and Di Taylor are always in the room and after many years of doing the gig I’m proud to count Janet and Steve Dean and the wonderfully dedicated Martin Wragg among my friends as well.
When I first started thinking about how I should set the tone for the event, there were two main themes:
1. Point out that mountain literature has lots of other channels than books.
We can’t have the literati taking themselves too seriously. And
2. Make it light-hearted, irreverent and funny.
Here’s my notes from the inaugural address in 2016:
Each year, I’ve trawled the seabed of my brain for different ways with words to express what mountains mean to us as a community. I’ve used sources as diverse as poetry and guidebook iconography. I especially enjoyed using descriptions of mountains in children’s books, specifically The Hobbit and Winnie The Pooh. One of the biggest laughs I’ve ever had from the audience was when Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh have the following exchange while hunting for the North Pole:
"We are all going on an Expedition," said Christopher Robin.
"Going on an Expotition?" said Pooh eagerly. "I don't think I've ever been on one of those. Where are we going to on this Expotition?"
"Expedition, silly old Bear. It's got an 'x' in it."
"Oh!" said Pooh. "I know." But he didn't really.
"We're going to discover the North Pole."
"Oh!" said Pooh again. "What is the North Pole?" he asked.
"It's just a thing you discover," said Christopher Robin carelessly, not being quite sure himself.
"Oh! I see," said Pooh. "Are bears any good at discovering it?"
"Of course they are. And Rabbit and Kanga and all of you. It's an Expedition. That's what an Expedition means. A long line of everybody.”
A gale of laughter went round the Malt Room (phew, thinks Andy. Result!).
The last line clearly resonated with quite a few folk in the Malt Room.
Initially I was quite cautious, wanting to ensure I did Pete and Joe (and the Award) justice. As the gigs went by, I felt I could push the envelope a little more. One year we had a live quiz to identify the mountain related song lyrics, where the audience had to guess the song titles from a sound bite, after which we’d play the extract. Here they are again for your delectation and delight. No cheating by referring to Google:
You say the hill's too steep to climb
Climb it.
You say you'd like to see me try
Climbing.
You pick the place
and I'll choose the time
And I'll climb
The hill in my own way.
Just wait a while
for the right day.
Pretty easy that one…
Now try this for size.
Amusing belly dancers
Distract me from my wine
Across Tibetan mountains
Are memories of mine
I've stood some ghostly moments
With natives in the hills
Recording here on paper
My chills and thrills and spills
One culturally attuned audience member got it before we played the clip.
Hats off to that man, whoever you are.
I was particularly pleased to use that last line, as BT shortlisted authors often spend time in the hills and record on paper their chills and thrills and spills. These lyrics are followed by a banging 70’s rock guitar solo which fades to a pulsing drumbeat. Welcoming a besuited Martin Wragg to the stage, waving my arms around like Kermit the Frog on the Muppet Show was one of the dafter moments in my Kendal career.
Music has a real power to raise emotion and set a tone.
Just a few days before the 2019 festival, the innovative and inspirational climber (and BT shortlisted author) Andy Pollitt had died suddenly with a cerebral aneurysm.
His friend Steve Dean asked me to say a few words before we kicked off the second half when the award gets announced. It can be quite hard to get people to take their seats as they’re often in white-wine-fuelled conversation with friends. This time it was easy: the cover of Andy’s book “Punk in the Gym” appeared on screen, accompanied by a very loud 60 seconds of Joan Jett’s version of “Let’s Do It”. Everyone was firmly sat down as the last chord crashed. I stood up and said:
“Ladies and gentlemen. The Punk has left the Gym. A minute’s silence would be inappropriate”.
It’s one of my finer lines, and I like to think that Pollitt would have approved.
Similarly, I’d like to think that the spirits of Pete and Joe, borne by the jet stream from the north-north-east ridge of Everest, swept round the world, up Kendal High Street and into the Brewery Arts Centre, would stand at the back of the Malt Room and grin quietly. It’s been a real privilege to try and do them justice each year, and a pleasure bringing the event to Kendal.
When the BT moved to an online event in the aftermath of Covid, I had the challenge of maintaining the same principles of tone but without the audience interaction. The bonus was that I’d be “presenting” at home in Chamonix rather than in the darkness of the Malt Room, and that gave some location opportunities and source of inspiration. My first broadcast was from the foot of the boulder in Snell’s field, and 2021’s BT intro used steep skiing as a metaphor for writing books.
I retired from my position as presenter coordinator at KMF after the 2021 Festival, and when the tribe gathers in Kendal on the 19th November, I’ll be on a flight to Antarctica.
Meanwhile, my thanks to the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature team for all their hard work in bringing it to the public, the authors for their creativity and inspiring us to do more, and to you the audience for tolerating my irreverence each year. 2023 is of course forty years since the first Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature. Here’s to many more!
Cheers. 🍻
Andy P
Chamonix
September 2022
The Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature continues to attract a substantial level of entries. This year there were 40 entries, from Great Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Peru and the USA. The Award will be made at the Boardman Tasker Shortlisted Authors and Awards event at the Kendal Mountain Festival, on Friday November 18th 2022 at 7 to 9pm (UK time).
Tickets available here.
The judges for 2022 are Marni Jackson (Chair), Matt Fry and Natalie Berry. They have selected the following 6 books for this year’s shortlist:
Simon & Schuster
A highly engaging, often humorous account of a dedicated climber who is forced to spend the pandemic in lockdown, in Italy, mostly NOT climbing—and the consequences for his mental health. A reminder of why mountains matter.
Kieran Cunningham is a Scottish climber and journalist who lives in Sondrio, Italy, a mountainous part of Lombardy which lies south of the Swiss border and about fifty miles from Lake Como. He has lived there for six years, having arrived as a teacher and then switching to a full-time career as a climbing journalist, writing for the Observer, Little India, Cool of the Wild, and Moja Gear as well as editing the outdoors blog My Open Country.
Canongate Publishing
A gorgeously written, elegant and sensual account of the intimate relationship between climber and rock, whether it’s the gritstone of the Peak District or the granite of the Cairngorms. A peripatetic meditation on how “we shape the rock and the rock shapes us”.
Anna Fleming is a regular contributor to Caught by the River and has also published her work in various journals, magazines and anthologies. As well as writing for the Guardian, she keeps a regular blog, The Granite Sea, in which she writes about her experiences of the natural world. Anna is a qualified Mountain Leader who has also worked for the Cairngorms National Park Authority and completed a PhD with the University of Leeds. She lives in Edinburgh.
Sandstone Press
Brian Hall grew up with the radical climbers who would come to define a wild and glorious chapter of Himalayan mountaineering in the late nineteen seventies and eighties. He partied with them, climbed with them, and grieved many of the eleven unforgettable climbers portrayed in his book. High Risk takes the reader right to the heart and soul of the golden age of UK climbing.
Climbing exploits worldwide led Brian Hall to become an internationally certified mountain guide who provides extreme location safety and rigging for the film industry. His numerous credits include the BAFTA award-winning film Touching the Void. Between 1980 and 2008, he co-directed the Kendal Mountain Film Festival of which he is a founder. Brian and his wife, Louise, divide their time between the UK’s Peak District and New Zealand’s Southern Alps.
WiDO Publishing
Robert Charles Lee is a professional risk scientist who likes to test his own limits, in life, love and in the mountains, climbing rock and ice. He doesn’t play safe with his writing either, offering readers his unfiltered, sometimes jaw-dropping account of what it means to take risks, and survive.
Robert Charles Lee is a retired scientist, with a former career in risk analysis, decision analysis, and risk management. His work ranged from patient safety to radioactive waste to asteroid impact risk - and yes, mountaineering risk. He was born in North Carolina, USA and lived there for over twenty years, but has since lived and worked in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, and Alberta, Canada. He currently lives in Colorado with his wife Linda and their two dogs.
Ebury Press
One of Britain’s best young poets draws a line between the risks and terrors of motherhood and an untethered life in the mountains. Shadowing the life of Alison Hargreaves, the pioneering UK climber who did not give up alpinism when she became a mother, Helen Mort brilliantly explores the visceral education that is part of climbing mountains, and giving birth.
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. Her first collection, Division Street (2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Poetry Award, and won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she was named as a 'Next Generation Poet', the prestigious accolade announced only once every ten years, recognising the 20 most exciting new poets from the UK and Ireland. No Map Could Show Them (2016), her second collection, about women and mountaineering, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Helen has been the Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence and the Derbyshire Poet Laureate and was named one of the RSL's 40 under 40 Fellows in 2018. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield. Black Car Burning was her first novel, and A Line Above the Sky is her first work of narrative memoir.
Vertebrate Publishing
The author of Deep Play has gone even deeper in this investigation into the spiritual rewards of a life in the mountains. After Paul was almost killed by a falling rock while climbing a sea stack in Tasmania, he had to push through new physical limitations to philosophical insights that changed his life. A beautifully written, devastatingly honest account of choosing to live.
Paul was a cutting-edge rock climber and mountaineer hailing from the UK. His climbing adventures took him from Wales to the Himalayas and from Baffin Island to Patagonia.
When he won the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature in 1997, with his book Deep Play, he used the prize money on a world climbing tour that found him in Tasmania climbing a slender sea stack known as The Totem Pole. It was here that all he had known before was turned on its head.
On Friday the 13th of February 1998 a TV-sized boulder falling from twenty-five meters inflicted such terrible head injuries that doctors thought he might never walk or even speak again.
Being in hospital for a year gave Paul the impetus to write his second book: The Totem Pole. This narrative about his personal journey through hemiplegia won him an unprecedented second Boardman Tasker prize, and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize. His most recent book is The Mountain Path published in 2021.
*All comments on the books are courtesy of Marni Jackson, 2022 Chair of Judges.
Once again the Award continues to attract a high level of interest and entries on a variety of aspects of the mountain environment.
Steve Dean
Secretary
Boardman Tasker Charitable Trust
08/09/2022
