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Thomas Cook Travel Book Award

Given by thomas cook ag, shortlist 2, tags show numbers, top members.

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25th Thomas Cook Travel Book Awards: the shortlist

Ghost Riders Richard Grant (Abacus, £7.99)

The wandering spirit is part of the American psyche, from American Indians to conquistadors, frontiersmen, migrant workers and hobos. Grant travels the big open spaces to brings us tales from those who live on the road.

What the papers say: "Original and clear-eyed, Ghost Riders is the freshest travel book on the United States in a long time." TLS

William Hill odds: 7/2.

Tibet, Tibet

Patrick French (Harper Perennial, £8.99)

Tibet has gone from being "obscure to cult-fashionable to mainstream in a decade", says French, who attempts to break down the myth of the Himalayan kingdom and bring us the real story of the place, its people and its history.

What the papers say: "French's treatise is despairing, ambitious and gripping." The Guardian

The Factory Of Light

Michael Jacobs (John Murray, £7.99)

Michael Jacobs takes up residence in the isolated Andalucian village of Frailes, a place associated with olives and faith-healers. He ends up performing his own little miracle in the local cinema and attracts the attention of Hollywood.

What the papers say: "A welcome reminder that close encounters of the Mediterranean kind don't have to be all froth." Sunday Times

Beyond The Coral Sea

Michael Moran (Flamingo, £9.99)

Michael Moran spent his youth "wandering the dream world of Oceania". In adulthood, he sets off to explore the island provinces of Papua New Guinea and discovers idyllic beauty shadowed by brooding menace.

What the papers say: "Everything you ever wanted to know about cannibalism but were afraid to ask is here." Daily Telegraph

Running With Reindeer

Roger Took (John Murray, £8.99)

Art historian Roger Took heads to Russia in search of indigenous people in the wilderness. Living among Saami reindeer herders, he depicts their struggles to maintain traditions in spite of the Soviets' worst efforts.

What the papers say: 'A fascinating picture of one of the most inhospitable and inaccessible corners of the world' TLS

Hearing Birds Fly

Louisa Waugh (Little Brown, £7.99)

Louisa Waugh gets the notion to live out on the steppe among the nomads. She wanted remote, and she gets it in the furthest western village in Mongolia where 'people struggle so much just to survive'.

What the papers say: 'An extraordinary glimpse into a forgotten culture' The Observer

· The winner will be announced on September 15.

Most viewed

Thomas Cook Travel Book Award

The Thomas Cook Travel Book Award originated as an initiative of Thomas Cook AG in 1980, with the aim of encouraging and rewarding the art of literary travel writing. The awards stopped in 2005 (2004 being the last year an award was given). One year later, the only other travel book award in Britain, the Dolman Best Travel Book Award , began in 2006. [1]

External links

Source: [2]

• 2004, Richard Grant , Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads [3]
• 2003, Jenny Diski , Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions [4]
• 2002, Ma Jian , Red Dust: A Path Through China
• 2001, Stanley Stewart , In the Empire of Genghis Khan: An Amazing Odyssey Through the Lands of the Most Feared Conquerors in History
• 2000, Jason Elliot , An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
• 1999, Philip Marsden , The Spirit-Wrestlers: A Russian Journey
• 1998, Tim Mackintosh-Smith , Yemen:Travels in Dictionary Land
• 1997, Nicholas Crane , Clear Waters Rising: A Mountain Walk Across Europe
• 1996, Stanley Stewart , Frontiers of Heaven: A Journey to the End of China
• 1995, Gavin Bell , In Search of Tusitala: Travels in the Pacific After Robert Louis Stevenson
• 1994, William Dalrymple , City of Djinns
• 1993, Nick Cohn , The Heart of the World
• 1992, Norman Lewis , A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India
• Jonathan Raban , Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America
• Gavin Young , In Search of Conrad
• 1990, Mark Hudson , Our Grandmothers’ Drums
• 1989, Paul Theroux , Riding the Iron Rooster
• 1988, Colin Thubron , Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China
• 1986/87, Patrick Leigh Fermor , Between the Woods & the Water
• 1985, Patrick Marnham , So Far From God: Journey to Central America
• 1984, Geoffrey Moorhouse , To The Frontier
• 1983, Vikram Seth , From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
• 1982, Tim Severin , The Sinbad Voyage
• 1981, Jonathan Raban , Old Glory: An American Voyage
• 1980, Robyn Davidson , Tracks

Related Research Articles

Vikram Seth is an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has won several awards such as Padma Shri, Sahitya Academy Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award. Seth's collections of poetry such as Mappings and Beastly Tales are notable contributions to the Indian English language poetry canon.

John Ledyard was an American explorer and adventurer.

The genre of travel literature or travelogue encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs.

Jonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx Raban was an award-winning British travel writer, playwright, critic, and novelist.

Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron , FRAS is a British travel writer and novelist. In 2008, The Times ranked him among the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books , The Times , The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times . His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, between 2009 and 2017, was President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Timothy Severin was a British explorer, historian, and writer. Severin was noted for his work in retracing the legendary journeys of historical figures. Severin was awarded both the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. He received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for his 1982 book The Sindbad Voyage .

The National Outdoor Book Award ( NOBA ) was formed in 1997 as an American-based non-profit program which each year presents awards honoring the best in outdoor writing and publishing. It is housed at Idaho State University and chaired by Ron Watters. It is sponsored by the National Outdoor Book Awards Foundation, Idaho State University and the Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education. As of 2021, awards have been presented in 13 categories, although not all categories are awarded in any given year.

Philip Marsden , also known as Philip Marsden-Smedley , is an English travel writer and novelist.

Gavin David Young was a journalist and travel writer.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is a British, Yemen-based, Oxford-educated Arabist, writer, traveller and lecturer. He has written numerous books on the Middle East, won several awards and has presented a major BBC television series.

Arabia Through the Looking Glass is Jonathan Raban's first travel book, published in 1979, describing his travels in the Middle East, the Arab countries he visits and the people he meets along the way.

Horatio Clare is an English author known for travel, memoir, nature and children's books. He worked at the BBC as a producer on Front Row , Night Waves and The Verb .

Tim Butcher is an English author, broadcaster and journalist. He is the author of Blood River (2007), Chasing the Devil (2010) and The Trigger (2014), travel books blending contemporary adventure with history.

Old Glory is a travel book by Jonathan Raban. It is the winner of The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

Stanley Stewart FRSL is a British writer, who is the author of three travel books: Old Serpent Nile , Frontiers of Heaven , and In the Empire of Genghis Khan about journeys to the source of the Nile, through China to Xinjiang province, and across Mongolia by horse. The last two books both won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, in 1996 and 2001 respectively, making Stewart the only writer, with Jonathan Raban, to have won this prestigious award twice. He is a contributing editor at Conde Nast Traveller UK. His work appears in various periodicals including the Sunday Times , the Daily Telegraph , and National Geographic Traveler , and has been included in numerous anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2008, he was named the Magazine Writer of the year. He was born in Ireland, grew up in Canada, and has spent most of his adult life in the UK.

Riding the Iron Rooster (1988) is a travel book by Paul Theroux primarily about his travels through China in the 1980s. One of his aims is to disprove the Chinese maxim, "you can always fool a foreigner". It won the 1989 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

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 .

John Gimlette is an English author of travel literature. He has published five books to date; Panther Soup: A European Journey in War and Peace , Theatre Of Fish: Travels through Newfoundland and Labrador , At The Tomb Of The Inflatable Pig: Travels through Paraguay Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge and Elephant Complex . Jorge Antonio Halke Arévalos is a character in “The Pig”. After the publication he was killed in a dispute in 2005.

Ian Thomson is an English author, best known for his biography Primo Levi (2002), and reportage, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009)

• ↑ "Dolman Best Travel Book Award 2008" , Michael Kerr, via The Telegraph , July 7, 2008
• ↑ "Book Award 2004" . Thomas Cook Publishing. 2004. Archived from the original on 29 August 2005.
• ↑ "Thomas Cook Travel Book Award: the contenders for the 2003 prize" . Telegraph Media Group . 14 June 2003 . Retrieved 3 January 2015 .
• Thomas Cook Travel Book Award at the Wayback Machine (archived August 29, 2005)

Jonathan Lorie

Writing where travel, culture and history meet

Judging the Stanford Dolmen Travel Book of the Year 2020

Like Mark Twain, reports of the death of travel writing have been greatly exaggerated. I know this because I’ve spent the winter months reading the best of the past year’s travel books, helped now and then by my cat. 

This is not how most people choose to spend their winter evenings, but I’ve been one of the judges of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. It’s the travel world’s annual accolade for its best book writers, our successor to the legendary Thomas Cook Travel Book Award – among whose winners were many giants of our genre, which I fondly recall judging almost 20 years ago.

What a cast of characters the old Thomas Cook had honoured over the years…. Patrick Leigh Fermor, the only writer I know to have joined a cavalry charge across a castle drawbridge during a time of war. Norman Lewis, whose life included spying for Britain, writing the wondrous Voices of the Old Sea, owning a chain of camera stores and living with two women entirely unaware of each other. Then there were dashing English gentlemen like Tim Severin, scintillating heart-throbs like Jason Elliot, Soho bohemians like Jonathan Raban…. The prize judging took place at the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall, over candlelit dinners on plates decorated with portraits of Lord Byron.

It was a time and a place and a tone. Reports of the death of travel writing have partly been based on the fading of that generation, whose classic style is sometimes described as ‘the white linen suit in the tropics’. That’s an unfair phrase for some of those authors, but reading through this year’s books, it is clear that a sea-change has occurred.

Today the travel books on my coffee table, meekly awaiting judgement, are alive to the modern world and how it is turning. Almost all are reaching across cultures and eras to tell us – and sometimes warn us – about the forces unleashed by our new world disorder. Together they are defining a new territory for travel writing.

In the age of fake news, they offer us the testimony of the traveller, the first-hand report of what is actually going on across our troubled world. As the poet WH Auden once wrote, in a decade not unlike our own: ‘Consider this and in our time.’

So here are some of the shortlist chosen for this year’s award. Quietest of them all was Richard Bassett’s Last Days in Old Europe , whose title says it all. A gentle memoir of living in places that once were part of the glittering Hapsburg empire, it offered a poignant reminder that superpowers can fall apart.

Also seeking lessons from the past was Simon Winder’s Lotharingia , a history of the borderlands between France and Germany since the days of Charlemagne. Was this a travel book? Who knows, but its overriding point was that centuries of conflicts have started there from politicking and nationalism, culminating in two hideous world wars fought along disputed European borders.

The meaning of borders was explored by Paul Theroux, whose book On the Plain of Snakes saw him driving along the US-Mexican border to judge the realities of the controversial ‘wall’ and the societies on either side. Predictably, he found people less divided than their nations, and developed a heartfelt writer’s credo that the heart of a country lies in its ‘hard-up hinterland’ not its flashy tourist sites. 

Sara Wheeler traversed the hard-up hinterland of Russia in Mud and Stars , searching for the stories of its great and often exiled writers – people such as Pushkin and Chekov – which mainly reminded me that there was a time when Russia was so cultured that it bothered to send its writers to Siberia. That era persisted from the Tsars through the Soviets, but probably ended with the present regime.

The rise of Putin’s Russia was vividly observed by Rory Maclean in Pravda Ha Ha , in meetings with everyone from illegal migrants to obscenely wealthy oligarchs. In a finely written and funny book, he pursues a serious question: why has Russia moved from optimism and democracy at the fall of the Berlin Wall, towards fatalism and dictatorship today? His answer involves national trauma and the comforts of nostalgia, imagined resentments against the outside world, and a widespread willingness to believe in lies. The implications for our own society are clear and somewhat chilling. Maclean’s book was runner-up for the Dolmen Award – and rightly so.

Moving away from the pressures of our day, but circling back to explain them, were two further books well worth a read. 

Epic Continent , by Nicholas Jubber, followed him across the regions spanned by various national myths in Europe – from innocent tales such as the Odyssey in Greece or a Viking saga in Iceland, to stories that have forged influential myths of more questionable kinds: most notably the duplicitous Song of Ronald that fired French patriotism for centuries, and the Rhineland tales of German heroism that inspired Wagner and then the Nazis. The inescapable conclusion is that nations define themselves through myths of a literary kind like these, and also through political myths – or shall we call them lies – about their own greatness, which prompt them towards aggression.

And finally, the winning book was Robert Macfarlane’s Underland , an astonishing work that takes us back to the beginnings of mankind in the rock-art caves of the Dordogne, and forwards to the futuristic mines being built in Finland and America to store our nuclear waste. In between he examines some of the greatest questions – what it means to be human, why we bury our dead, how we treat the world’s resources as riches to be extracted, and ultimately whether we will prove to have been good environmental guardians for the generations that will follow ours. The book may prove to be Macfarlane’s masterpiece. 

All of which is a long way from the elegant dinners in the Travellers’ Club of yore. And perhaps all the better for it. I look forward to next year’s list.

The Thomas Cook Travel Book Award

Since 1980, Thomas Cook, the U.K.-based travel giant, has been honoring the art of travel writing with its annual Travel Book Award, announced each fall. Aside from inspiring readers to travel, the award also spurs greater travel-book sales, according to Thomas Cook spokesperson Joan Lee. "Booksellers benefit … by the increased sales generated by the promotion of the [Travel Book] Award," Lee said in a statement. "Many online booksellers feature the short-listed titles on their Web sites, and their sales of these featured titles increase significantly."

Thomas Cook plans to announce the books short-listed for the 2002 prize in early summer, allowing booksellers to promote the travel books as "holiday reading." Furthermore, the company will make point-of-sale material available -- free of charge -- to bricks-and-mortar stores, as well as Travel Book Award bookmarks for online booksellers to include in order fulfillment. POS material and bookmarks will be available in late spring.

The winner of the Travel Book Award receives £10,000, and entries are open to all books published in the English language during the previous year. Books may only be submitted by their publishers.

Last year’s Travel Book Award winner was In the Empire of Genghis Kahn by Stanley Stewart (HarperCollins).

For more information, go to www.thetravelbookaward.com , or e-mail Joan Lee at [email protected] .

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Vikram Seth

• Non-Fiction
• Short Stories
• Translation
• Calcutta, India
• David Godwin Associates

Born in 1952 in Calcutta, India, Vikram Seth was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Stanford University and Nanjing University.

He has travelled widely and lived in Britain, California, India and China. His first novel, The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986), describes the experiences of a group of friends living in California. His acclaimed epic of Indian life, A Suitable Boy (1993), won the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book). Set in India in the early 1950s, it is the story of a young girl, Lata, and her search for a husband. An Equal Music (1999) is the story of a violinist haunted by the memory of a former lover. Vikram Seth is also the author of a travel book, From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), an account of a journey through Tibet, China and Nepal that won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and a libretto, Arion and the Dolphin: A Libretto (1994), which was performed at the English National Opera in June 1994, with music by Alec Roth. His poetry includes Mappings (1980), The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985), winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia), and All You Who Sleep Tonight: Poems (1990). His children's book, Beastly Tales from Here and There (1992), consists of ten stories about animals told in verse.

Vikram Seth's latest works include  Two Lives (2005), a memoir of the marriage of his great uncle and aunt, and Summer Requiem (2015), a book of poems.

Critical perspective

It comes as a surprise to some readers of seth’s a suitable boy (1993) that the author of this, the longest novel in english ever written, has also penned six volumes of poetry..

What is surprising is not Seth’s shift between prose and poetry (here he is in the company of several contemporary writers), but that an author famous for such an expansive, ‘unrestrained’ work of fiction, could also write with the formal and verbal restraint, economy and discipline of Seth-the-poet.  Mappings (1980) was Seth’s first volume of poetry, a little known collection, it includes translations of work by Chinese, German and Hindi poets. Through Mappings Seth served something of an apprenticeship while revealing an early preoccupation with European and Chinese (Seth does not see himself as a singularly ‘Indian’ writer) cultural production that has, if anything, become more pronounced in his more recent work.  Mappings was followed by From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), a popular and compelling autobiographical tale of the author’s journey from Nepal to India and the many and varied people he meets on the way. Travel also provides the direction for Seth’s next two collections, The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985) and All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990). The Humble Administrator’s Garden , is a witty collection of nature poems structured around plants/places: Wutong (China), Neem (India) and Live-Oak (California). All You Who Sleep Tonight is an elegant book of poetry that combines the sharp humour that characterises so much of Seth’s writing with darker subjects such as Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In his next book of poems,  Beastly Tales from Here and There (1991), Seth further displays his capacity for wit. As its title makes explicit, this is another narrative of journeys and journeying that takes us through Greece, China, India and the Ukraine - not to mention the fantasy world of Gup. Structured around the classic tension between good and evil and punctuated by superb illustrations, these tales in verse will appeal as much to children as to adults. In  Three Chinese Poets (1992) Seth offers us his most ambitious and daring translation to date. The poets of the title are the T’ang dynasty poets Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu. Translated from the original ideograms (the graphic symbols of the Chinese writing system), Seth closely follows the form and subject of the poems in what is a controlled and skillful collection.

Seth’s first ‘novel’ - The Golden Gate - was published in 1986. It is composed of no less than 690 rhyming tetrameter sonnets (more than 7000 lines). Gore Vidal has called it ‘the Great California novel’. The Golden Gate is a satirical romance set in San Francisco and is centred on the relationship of two professionals.

In his next novel, A Suitable Boy, Seth combined satire and romance to even greater effect in what became one of the most popular epic narratives of the late twentieth century. This heavy weight novel, described by one critic as ‘three and a half pounds of perfection’ has earned Seth comparison with Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. The classic realism of A Suitable Boy , which took Seth almost a decade to write, was for many readers of Indian fiction in English, a welcome break from the magical realism of that other heavy weight author from the subcontinent, Salman Rushdie. Indeed Seth describes his preferred prose style in a manner that seems to implicitly contrast him with that of Rushdie: 'the kind of books I like reading are books where the authorial voice doesn’t intrude … [or] … pull you up with the brilliance of their sentences'. Of course, such comparisons ultimately conceal more than they reveal: if Seth’s novel represents a move away from self-conscious modernist experimentation then how are we to read the self-conscious epigraph with which it opens: ‘The secret of being a bore is to say everything’ (Voltaire)? Set in Brahmpur, A Suitable Boy uses the taboo relationship between a boy and girl as a metonym through which to explore the post-Independence conflict in India between Hindus and Muslims. The novel centres on four families: the Kapoors, Mehras and Chatterjis (Hindus) and the Khans (Muslim). Mrs Rupa Mehra is looking for a ‘suitable boy’ for her wayward daughter, Lata. ‘Suitable’ here means Hindu, but Lata, it seems, has her eyes set on a Muslim boy. The repercussions of this relationship consume one thousand, three hundred and forty-nine pages.

Seth’s next novel, An Equal Music (1999), is another romantic novel, but this time minus the satire of A Suitable Boy and a thousand or so pages. The book centres on two gifted musicians: Michael Holme and Julia McNicholl. As Michael works on a Beethoven piece for the Maggiore Quartet, he grows increasingly preoccupied with recollections of his student days in Vienna where he met Julia. When the two are reunited by chance in London, their relationship is rekindled. One of the most impressive aspects of this novel is the way in which it manages to convey music through language. While Seth is modest about his musical abilities, the fact that he was commissioned to write a libretto (later published as Arion and the Dolphin ) for the English National Opera in 1994 suggests he is no novice. An Equal Music takes a conventional romantic plot and renders it compelling and novel through the seductive clarity and precision of its prose.

James Proctor, 2003

Bibliography

Related links:.

• http://www.meettheauthor.co.uk

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