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:
Kieran Cunningham
CLIMBING THE WALLS
Learning to Cope When your World Crumbles
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.
Anna Fleming
TIME ON ROCK
A Climber’s Route into the Mountains
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.
Brian Hall
HIGH RISK
Climbing to Extinction
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.
Robert Charles Lee
THROUGH DANGEROUS DOORS
A Life at Risk
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.
Helen Mort
A LINE ABOVE THE SKY
A Story of Mountains and Motherhood
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.
Paul Pritchard
THE MOUNTAIN PATH
A Climber’s Journey through Life & Death
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