Boardman Tasker Award at Kendal Mountain Festival 2020

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We’re excited for the Boardman Tasker Award to be screening this Saturday 21st November as part of Kendal Mountain Festival Online.

In this special 2 hour event hosted by Stephen Venables, you will hear from all the shortlisted authors;
Patrick Baker, The Unremembered Places;
Emily Chappell, Where There's A Will;
Peter Foster, The Uncrowned King of Mont Blanc;
Peter Goulding, Slatehead;
Jessica J. Lee
, Two Trees Make A Forest;

This will be followed by the Chair of Judges Katie Ives announcing the 2020 winner.

We’re delighted to offer a 20% discount on tickets and passes for Kendal Mountain Festival with the code: BOARDMANTASKER20

Hear more about the event from our patron Sir Chris Bonington:

Kendal Mountain Festival 2020

The team at Kendal have seized this huge opportunity to Share The Adventure with the world, pouring all their effort and energy into creating a new, amazing, digital experience that’s packed with the famous Kendal spirit and vibe!

The main stage will deliver to a unique mix of some of the world's most renowned international athletes and adventurers, an array of incredible authors, 15 different themed curations featuring the latest adventure and environmental films, family-friendly content, and all the buzz and atmosphere of the legendary activity-focused sessions - live-streamed and available on-demand to your screen.

There’s more than 200 films, 15 specialist sessions and over 30 literature talks. Live and on-demand from Thursday 19th November right through until 31st December.

We’ve taken a look through the vast programme, and selected some recommendations, including previous shortlisted and winning authors.

First off - take a look at this speakers page where you can see the incredible variety of speakers at Kendal this year.

Our recommendations

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Peter Goulding - Slatehead

Hear more from one of this year’s shortlisted authors - Peter Goulding at his Slatehead talk. Part creative non-fiction, part memoir, part sports documentary, Slatehead is set in both Thatcher's Britain and the present day. It conveys not only a climber's passion for the quick-drying slate slopes but also his love for his friends and the punks who first created the climbs.


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Bernadette McDonald - Winter 8000

For the first time, award-winning author Bernadette McDonald tells the story of how Poland’s ice warriors made winter their own, perfecting what they dubbed ‘the art of suffering’ as they fought their way to the summit of Everest in the winter of 1980 – the first 8,000-metre peak they climbed this way but by no means their last.


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Ed Caeser - The Moth And The Mountain

The untold story of Britain's most mysterious mountaineering legend - Maurice Wilson - and his heroic attempt to climb Everest. Alone.

In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceived his own crazy, beautiful plan: he would fly a Gipsy Moth aeroplane from England to Everest, crash land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit - all utterly alone.

Wilson didn't know how to climb. He barely knew how to fly. But he had pluck, daring and a vision - he wanted to be the first man to stand on top of the world. Traumatised by his wartime experiences and leaving behind a trail of broken hearts, Wilson believed that Everest could redeem him.


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Ed Douglas - Himalaya: A Human History

This is the first major history of the Himalaya: an epic story of peoples, cultures and adventures among the world’s highest mountains. Spanning millennia, from its earliest inhabitants to the present conflicts over Tibet and Everest, Himalaya is a soaring account of resilience and conquest, discovery and plunder, oppression and enlightenment at the ‘roof of the world’.


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Kerri Andrews - Wanderers: A History Of Women Walking

This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years, have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers.

In a series of intimate, incisive portraits, Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter ‐ who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England ‐ to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury.


This list is my no means exhaustive, we’d recommend taking some time to explore the Kendal Mountain Festival website and planning your Festival week!