2022 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature. Shortlist Announced
- Thursday 8th 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). More details here www.boardmantasker.com/
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.
Anna Fleming
TIME ON ROCK - A Climber’s Route into the Mountains
(Canongate)
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*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