The Boardman Tasker Award continues to enhance its international reputation. This year it attracted 33 entries from nine different countries: England, Bulgaria, Canada, Georgia, India, New Zealand, Switzerland, USA and Wales.
The Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature will be awarded to the winner(s) at the Boardman Tasker Award Shortlisted Authors event at the Kendal Mountain Festival on Friday November 20th 2026.
The Judges for 2026 were Nandini Purandare (Chair), Brian Hall, and Tony Whittome. They have selected the following 6 books for the 2026 Shortlist:
Louise K. Blight
WHERE THE EARTH MEETS THE SKY
A Story of Penguins, People and Place in Antarctica
The Westbourne Press (imprint of Saqi Books)
Antarctica is a land of extremes. It is the coldest, windiest, and most inaccessible part of our planet—and now one of the places most affected by climate change’. Here scientists work in the harshest of seasons, studying wildlife, changing weather patterns and such. One scientist, Louise Blight takes us there for a bleak and cold three summer months.
Not much happens in Where Earth Meets the Sky, in fact even day does not melt into night. We assist pioneer scientist David Ainley who is studying penguins. We have a set routine and not much happens to change it. We coexist with a small multi-national community, sometimes in harmony, sometimes not. We set out to document how the Earth’s largest-ever iceberg affects the tens of thousands of breeding penguins rushing to mate and rear their young. We record courtship, incubation, and chick-rearing against a backdrop of jaw dropping landscape. On an island far away with its wind and its freeze, where the earth meets the sky, we walk among the penguins andleave with a deep desire to do something to save this beautiful planet. Thank you for this gift.
Riaz Dean
EVEREST SURGEON
Michael Ward and the exploration of High Asia
Pen & Sword Books
Michael Ward (1925-2005) was the expedition doctor on first ascent of Everest in 1953, and two years before he crucially instigated the 1951 Everest reconnaissance expedition which discovered the route the climbers would eventually follow. He led a team who over-wintered in the Khumbu area of Nepal on the 1960-61 Himalayan Scientific and Mountaineering Expedition, which gained groundbreaking knowledge on high altitude medicine. His mountaineering skills were demonstrated when he led the first ascent of the iconic Ama Dablam, a climb considered years before its time. His travels and mapping of the forbidden kingdom of Bhutan make fascinating reading. As does his diplomacy in gaining permission and leading an attempt on the unclimbed Kongur, directly after the turbulent Chinese Cultural Revolution. The cold and windswept summit was finally reached by Bonington, Tasker, Boardman and Rouse.
Ed Douglas
UPLAND
The Strange History and Vital Future of Britain’s Mountains
The Bodley Head, VINTAGE-Penguin Random House
The wild drama and challenge of Britain’s high places are realities climbers and mountain dwellers respect, but few ‘lowlanders' - most Britons - fully appreciate their role in our national story. To redress this, Ed Douglas study of our uplands is an eye-opening adventure on the challenging scale of its subject. Starting with turbulent geology, when rocks are thrust into the sky and folded in on themselves, before considering history (both natural and political) and mountain culture in its widest sense, he encourages us to see our hills in a new way, as shapers of our identity, often through conflict and resistance. Much of what we are, even now in our post-industrial state, has been made in our hills, whether in Scotland, Wales or the North of England. This is a dramatic and often tragic story but one with hope for the future: despite savage depredations, uplands can be restored. Passionate, deeply researched, often startling in its insights and full of fascinating stories and anecdotes, this is a human story on the grandest scale.
Graham Hoyland
FIRST ON EVEREST
The Life of Howard Somervell
The History Press
‘First on Everest’ is the fascinating portrait of Howard Somervell; it tells a story of one of the leading alpinists of the early twentieth century. The descriptions of his life as a surgeon on the killing fields of the Somme are horrific. His faith carried him through,and he became a key member of the 1922 and 1924 Everest Expeditions. Little was known of the route from Tibet, nor the problems of altitude sickness and the methods of acclimatisation…. what clothing for the brutal jet stream winds, or how to camp, cook and drink on the freezing slopes. They suffered frostbite, cerebral oedema, hypothermia, thirst, appalling weather and avalanches. He formed a close relationship with George Mallory and on the second expedition he set a world altitude record for climbing without oxygen, which stood for fifty years. He was a Cambridge graduate, musician and a gifted artist; the book is illustrated with his exquisite watercolour paintings. After Everest, this great man dedicated his life to being a medical missionary in India.
Kapka Kassabova
BORROWED LAND
A Highland Story
Jonathan Cape
Poetry and passion, anger and love are all intermingled in this extraordinary book which tells the story of a Scottish glen going through a process of terrible change. It’s partly a memoir, partly an extraordinarily sensitive evocation of a pattern of living rooted in this particular land, and partly a lament for what is being lost. But it's also a clarion call for resistance against forces that outsiders might think positive - the pursuit of net zero, which in this case involves wind-turbines, dams, hydro-electric stations, insensitive industrialisation for profit and through it the destruction of a centuries-old way of life. For years Kapka Kassabova has lived in this isolated community, absorbing its ways, exploring its rich culture and language and relishing its characters whose stories she tells in wonderful pen-portraits which are at the heart of her book. Through her supple and sensitive writing, the culture of the Highlands comes magically alive. How long will it last?
Gabriel Tallent
CRUX
Penguin Random House UK (imprint Fig Tree)
Crux is a fictional page turning account of two teenagers set against cliffs and boulders, their desire to climb, mostly their desire to prove themselves and to fiercely protect the activity that binds them together. Tamma Callahan is a gay, teenage outcast living in a small town in the Mojave Desert with a family that doesn’t understand her. She has one friend, a fellow high school senior named Dan Redburn. Tamma is drawn to Dan because he is drawn to the cliff faces in Joshua Tree. Two adolescents discover themselves and each other against the formidable rocks of their county. You fall in love with Tamma far before she displays her tenderness and you fall in love with all her family as well. You also fall in love with Dan’s mother, once a writer but now withdrawn from the world. Crux is different from all other books on the short-list, the only novel and a fresh window on the world of young American climbers, their radical and vivid use of language, and their obsessive passion for their sport. This novel is hard and dark but so uplifting; it is about people who existentially struggle, always struggle.
The comments are courtesy of Nandini Purandare, on behalf of the Judges.
Tickets for the Boardman Tasker Award Shortlisted Authors event at Kendal Mountain Festival on Friday November 20th 2026 are available now.