The 2022 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature went to both Brian Hall, for High Risk: Climbing to Extinction and to Helen Mort for A Line Above The Sky.

Congratulations to the winners!

HIGH RISK

Brian Hall grew up with the radical climbers who would come to define a wild and glorious chapter of Himalayan mountaineering in the late nineteen seventies and eighties. He partied with them, climbed with them, and grieved many of the eleven unforgettable climbers portrayed in his book. High Risk takes the reader right to the heart and soul of the golden age of UK climbing.

Climbing exploits worldwide led Brian Hall to become an internationally certified mountain guide who provides extreme location safety and rigging for the film industry. His numerous credits include the BAFTA award-winning film Touching the Void. Between 1980 and 2008, he co-directed the Kendal Mountain Film Festival of which he is a founder. Brian and his wife, Louise, divide their time between the UK’s Peak District and New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

A LINE ABOVE THE SKY

One of Britain’s best young poets draws a line between the risks and terrors of motherhood and an untethered life in the mountains. Shadowing the life of Alison Hargreaves, the pioneering UK climber who did not give up alpinism when she became a mother, Helen Mort brilliantly explores the visceral education that is part of climbing mountains, and giving birth.

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. Her first collection, Division Street (2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Poetry Award, and won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she was named as a 'Next Generation Poet', the prestigious accolade announced only once every ten years, recognising the 20 most exciting new poets from the UK and Ireland. No Map Could Show Them (2016), her second collection, about women and mountaineering, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Helen has been the Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence and the Derbyshire Poet Laureate and was named one of the RSL's 40 under 40 Fellows in 2018. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield. Black Car Burning was her first novel, and A Line Above the Sky is her first work of narrative memoir.

If you missed the Award Ceremony - you can watch it on Kendal Mountain Player from Saturday 19 November.

The Chair Of Judges’ speech by Marni Jackson is available to read here.