Arrived back in Canada late yesterday, and have a week in Québec City with my family before returning home to the mountains. I am very tired. The trip to England was intense and fun but exhausting. I’ll blog more about all of that later - I just wanted to pass along that I did not win in Kendal, that honor goes to Steve House, but I did come close.
From the judges adjudication speech at the festival award cerimony:
So to an example of perhaps the rarest type of mountain writing: the successful literary mountaineering novel. Rare, because it just seems to be so very difficult to write convincing mountaineering fiction.
We think Jerry Auld has succeeded in doing so in his book Hooker and Brown, in which he takes three contrasting characters working in the Parks Service in the Pacific North West and sets them an intriguing tale: the existence or otherwise of the eponymous peaks, Mounts Hooker and Brown, located somewhere in the vast backcountry but still unclimbed. Of course, they have to go and find out for themselves. The technical quality of the writing in this book is of the first order.
Auld has been published in magazines, but this is his first novel. We think the book displays a literary talent that could take him well beyond the confines of a mountaineering audience. But literary pyrotechnics, even when as impressive as here, are not enough, and this book also achieves what we think mountaineering fiction must do at all costs: it sets up questions which cannot be answered by other forms.
You can get the whole thing here.
I had the chance to chat with the judges (and other authors and publishers) and the feedback and encouragement and new contacts were well worth the trip. Instead of being disheartened, I actually feel more fired up and focused than ever. I managed to draft a short story on the plane yesterday, and an exicted to get the rest of those done and start work on the next novel which feels like it is starting to grow and might burst soon - then I’ll be able to work on nothing else.
One other note: I met Robert Davidson, who is the publisher of Sandstone Press in the Scottish Highlands (can I hear the pipes calling me home?) and he said some nice things on his blog. Money quote:
The afternoon event was, to coin the well worn cliché, a game of two halves. Both were superbly organised and delivered.
In the first, climber, author and former Boardman Tasker winner Stephen Venebles interviewed each of the authors in turn with the exception of Chic Scott who had not managed the long journey from Canada. In fact two Canadian authors had reached the short list and the only novelist, Jerry Auld, gave a very impressive interview and reading. So did the eventual winner from America Steve House, author of Beyond the Mountain.
Stephen had obviously done his home work but, in addition, seemed to find a natural empathy with all the authors. John Allen and Jerry Auld perhaps made some additional impact by dint of their books being rather different from the more normal run of big expedition, big climb books. Stephen Venebles described Cairngorm John as ‘unclassifiable’. Really though, all of the authors were impressive with Steve also rather standing out because of the high risk taking element of his particular branch of human nature. He was also extremely articulate and obviously intelligent.
Read it all here.
