by Jonathan Lorie
It’s always a pleasure to judge the Bradt New Travel Writer of the Year award, the UK’s leading prize for new and unpublished travel writers – partly for the quality of entries, partly for the jousting between judges and partly for what it tells us about the state of the genre and sometimes the state of the world.
This year was no exception. The expert panel gathered, five lifelong fans of travel writing: Amy Sohanpaul from Wexas Traveller magazine, Hilary Bradt, Adrian Philips and Hugh Brune from Bradt Guides, and myself. In front of us was a longlist of 15 travel stories on the theme of ‘A Hasty Exit’. Entertainingly they ranged from getting lost in the Gobi Desert to getting marooned off a Scottish island, Cold War memories in Belgrade and archaeological theft in Bolivia.
The genre is clearly in healthy form, though dealing with new realities. In most of these stories, a feeling of danger was ever-present and this may be a clue to our present state of mind. Here were tales of sinister encounters with strangers, falling ill in foreign places, risks of Covid or extortion or physical assault. To judge by these writings, we have entered an age of anxiety.
After much debate we agreed a shortlist of four stories, more than usual because they were so well written. How to describe them? Three were as above, shot through with unease, ending with redemption but only after darkness. The fourth offered more hope.
Jacqui Hatt’s entry, A Vital Warning Ignored, was a gripping tale of danger and rescue on a train in Serbia featuring two types of strangers – the ones that help you and the ones that really don’t.
Rebecca Legros wrote A Dance with Duende, a dazzling story of a mugging overcome by a lone woman in the backstreets of Spain, written in the format of a flamenco dance.
Sarah Davies’s The Birds of Auschwitz was a sensitively handled encounter with a place of profound evil in Poland, ending with a reflection on what it means today for those who visit.
Julie Adjour’s Later or Sooner was written like a folktale, recalling a map to the world’s most beautiful place, sketched on a napkin by a stranger in her youth but never followed since.
And perhaps that’s where we’re at today, as the world turns on its axis and old certainties go up in smoke: stuck between shadows and promises, searching for the kindness of strangers.
Tonight we will announce who won this year’s award, at a glittering ceremony in Stanford’s bookshop in Covent Garden. The grandees of travel publishing will be there. They may be pleased to learn that two of our shortlisted entries were written in experimental form, always a sign that writers are grappling with how stories can capture things, can structure and tame and maybe even redeem the realities we experience.
Whether hope will triumph over danger tonight, you’ll have to wait and see.
Shortlisted entries can be read on the Bradt website, where you can also sign up for alerts about next year’s award.