Welsh travel writing awards longlist revealed

Literary magazine New Welsh Review has longlisted nine writers for this year’s the ‘New Welsh Writing Awards 2016: University of South Wales Prize for Travel Writing’, including John Harrison and Nathan Llywelyn Munday.

The prize, run in association with the University of South Wales and CADCentre, is for short form travel writing (5,000-30,000 words) by writers who are either based in the UK and Ireland or have been educated in Wales.

This award is now in its second year and Gwen Davies, editor of New Welsh Review said: “This prize has gone from strength to strength with an increased number of entries and an excellent standard of writing. Branching out from our previous theme of nature, this year’s longlist of travel nonfiction sees a move towards the political.”

She added: “[The] essays follow the progress of a pioneering school from its refugee-camp origins in Ghana; a Nigerian domestic scene where subtle and interdependent racial and class issues are seething under a tight lid; the rise and fall of the pre-Columbian city of Tiwanaku in Bolivia and the underground (and underwater) currents of Mayan culture in the Yucatan, Mexico.

“In gentler pastures, meanwhile, language, geography, history, culture, religion and philosophy are given room to reflect in pieces that champion the humble Thames-side lock-keeper, the etiquette of the Trans-Siberian station pitstop; silence and spirituality on a Pennsylvanian Quaker residency, and the highs and lows of the grand narrative on trek through the Pyrenees.”

The shortlist will be announced at the Hay Festival on 1st June and the winner at a ceremony at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff on 7th July.

The fist prize is £1,000 cash, e-publication by New Welsh Review and a critique by literary agent Cathryn Summerhayes at WME. The second prize is a weeklong residential course in 2016 at Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre in Gwynedd, north Wales, and the third prize is a weekend stay at Gladstone’s Library in Flintshire. All three winners will also receive a one-year subscription to the magazine.

This year’s judges are Davies and travel writer Rory MacLean.

The longlist in full:

Virginia Astley (Dorchester, England), Keeping the River 

Evan Costigan (Kildare, Ireland), West Under a Blue Sky

Hannah Garrard (Norwich, England), No Situation is Permanent

John Harrison (London, England), The Rains of Titikaka

Gerald Hewitson (Holyhead, Wales), Oh my America

Julie Owen Moylan (Cardiff, Wales), Anxiety and Wet Wipes on Train Number Four

Nathan Llywelyn Munday (Cardiff, Wales), Seven Days: A Pyrenean Trek

Karen Phillips (Pembrokeshire, Wales), Stranger Shores

Mandy Sutter (Ilkley, England), Bush Meat: As My Mother Told Me