The Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature is an annual prize of £3,000 awarded by the Boardman Tasker Charitable Trust to an author or authors for "an original work which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature". The prize was established in 1983 in memory of British climbers Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, both of whom wrote books about their mountaineering expeditions, after their deaths on the northeast ridge of Mount Everest in 1982. It can be awarded for a piece of fiction or non-fiction, poetry or drama, although the work must have been written in English. The prize is announced at the annual Kendal Mountain Festival.
The Blow Monkeys are a British new wave/sophisti-pop band that formed in 1981. The first single, "Live Today Love Tomorrow," was released in 1982. They subsequently enjoyed a successful career with several hit singles and albums across the 1980s before splitting up at the beginning of the 1990s. Their first hit song was "Digging Your Scene," which hit No. 12 on the UK Singles Chart and No. 14 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in August 1986. They had four albums and eleven singles in the UK charts between 1986 and 1990.
Anna "Nan" Shepherd was a Scottish Modernist writer and poet, best known for her seminal mountain memoir, The Living Mountain, based on experiences of hill walking in the Cairngorms. This is noted as an influence by nature writers who include Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She also wrote poetry and three novels set in small fictional communities in Northern Scotland. The landscape and weather of this area played a major role in her novels and provided a focus for her poetry. Shepherd served as a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Education for most of her working life.
Edward Michael "Bear" Grylls is a British adventurer, writer, television presenter and businessman. He first drew attention after embarking on a number of adventures, and then became widely known for his television series Man vs. Wild (2006–2011). He is also involved in a number of wilderness survival television series in the UK and US, such as Running Wild with Bear Grylls and The Island with Bear Grylls. In July 2009, Grylls was appointed as The Scout Association’s youngest-ever Chief Scout of the United Kingdom and Overseas Territories at age 35, a post he has held for a second term since 2015.
Robert Macfarlane is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Outdoor literature is a literature genre about or involving the outdoors. Outdoor literature encompasses several different subgenres including exploration literature, adventure literature, mountain literature and nature writing. Another subgenre is the guide book, an early example of which was Thomas West's guide to the Lake District published in 1778. The genres can include activities such as exploration, survival, sailing, hiking, mountaineering, whitewater boating, geocaching or kayaking, or writing about nature and the environment. Travel literature is similar to outdoor literature but differs in that it does not always deal with the out-of-doors, but there is a considerable overlap between these genres, in particular with regard to long journeys.
Sula Sgeir is a small, uninhabited Scottish island in the North Atlantic, 18 kilometres west of Rona. One of the most remote islands of the British Isles, it lies approximately forty nautical miles north of Lewis and is best known for its population of gannets. It has a narrow elongated shape running north-northeast to south-southwest, and is approximately 900 m long by typically 100 m wide.
Thomas Luke Macfarlane is a Canadian and American actor and former singer. He is known for playing Scotty Wandell on the ABC television drama Brothers & Sisters (2006–2011), RAC Agent D'avin Jaqobis on the Space television science fiction series Killjoys (2015–2019), the romantic lead in a number of Hallmark Channel movies, and Aaron in Bros.
Roger Stuart Deakin was an English writer, documentary-maker and environmentalist. He was a co-founder and trustee of Common Ground, the arts, culture and environment organisation. Waterlog, the only book he published in his lifetime, topped the UK best seller charts and founded the wild swimming movement.
The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, Inc. was a cross-country event in 1986 aimed at raising awareness to the growing danger of nuclear proliferation and to advocate for complete, verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons from the earth. The GPM consisted of hundreds of people, mostly but not exclusively Americans, who convened in Los Angeles, California, United States, in February 1986 to walk from L.A. to Washington, D.C., the nation's capital. The group left Los Angeles on March 1, 1986 and arrived in Washington, D.C. on November 15, 1986, a journey of about 3,700 miles, nine months, and many campsites.
The Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards celebrate the best travel writing and travel writers in the world. The awards include the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year and the Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing.
Loch Coruisk is an inland fresh-water loch, lying at the foot of the Black Cuillin in the Isle of Skye, in the Scottish Highlands.
John Patrick Vivian Flynn is a British actor and singer-songwriter. He has starred as Dylan Witter in the Channel 4 and Netflix television sitcom Lovesick, and portrayed David Bowie in the film Stardust.
Jay Griffiths is a British writer and author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Anarchipelago, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape and Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression.
Macfarlanes LLP is a London-based law firm. Macfarlanes occupies a distinctive position in the London legal market. It offers a broad range of legal services, however, it does so in a way which is different from all its leading competitors.
Julia Lovell is a British scholar and prize-winning author and translator focusing on China.
The 2013 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 15 October 2013 to Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries. A longlist of thirteen titles was announced on 23 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 10 September. The jury was chaired by Robert Macfarlane, who was joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Natalie Haynes, Martha Kearney, and Stuart Kelly. The shortlist contained great geographical and ethnic diversity, with Zimbabwean-born NoViolet Bulawayo, Eleanor Catton of New Zealand, Jim Crace from England, Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri, Canadian-American Ruth Ozeki and Colm Tóibín of Ireland.
Bradley Garrett is an American social and cultural geographer at University College Dublin in Ireland and a writer for The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. He describes his research interests as being at the intersections of cultural geography, archaeology and visual methods and writes that his research is about "finding the hidden in the world". He is the author of five books including Bunker: Building for the End Times, a contemporary account of doomsday preppers around the world, and Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, an ethnographic account of the activities of the London Consolidation Crew (LCC), a group of urban explorers Garrett calls "place hackers".
Jackie Morris is a British writer and illustrator. She was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2016 and won it in 2019 for her illustration of The Lost Words, voted the most beautiful book of 2016 by UK booksellers. She is a recipient of the Tir na n-Og Award for children's book Seal Children.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey is a book by Robert Macfarlane and the sequel to The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. Initially published in English on 2 May 2019 by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and on 4 June 2019 by W. W. Norton & Company in the US, the book has been translated into over a dozen languages. An audiobook, read by Matthew Waterson, was also released in June 2019 by HighBridge Audio.
