I immediately bought it, and having now read it, I can confidently say that it’s my favourite of all the Boardman Tasker winners that I’ve read. It was the first non-climbing book to win the prize since Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places in 2007, and arguably one of only four or five in the prize’s history. Lands of Lost Borders was the one book that wasn’t about climbing. Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy and Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris: two books with much in common, but how much? I don’t know if the judges read my post or shared its thinking, but they certainly answered my prayers when they awarded the prize to Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris. That statement was deliberately provocative, and I’m not ashamed of making it, especially in the light of what happened.
In the same post, I predicted that the single token book out of six on last year’s shortlist that wasn’t about climbing had no chance of winning. I pointed out that only one winner in the last 20 years wasn’t about climbing, and to show how inclusive the subject of mountain literature really is, I provided a list of ten great books about mountains that weren’t about climbing. This makes its winners’ list a little uninspiring if your reading tastes are broader than that. In a post last September I mentioned how frustrating it was that the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature is essentially an award for climbing literature only. Kate Harris arrives among us like a meteor.
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