I never met Pete and Joe, but I have often climbed with Dick Renshaw, who was with them on Everest in 1982 and who had to leave the expedition after suffering a mild stroke, just a few days before they disappeared. So I felt a connection. In any case, I had of course followed their climbs closely and I loved their posthumously published books, ‘Sacred Summits’ and ‘Savage Arena’. I had always wanted to write something myself and was thrilled in 1985 when Maggie Body at Hodder & Stoughton accepted my unsolicited book proposal and sent me a contract. She was a brilliant editor who had cut her publishing teeth on the final books of Eric Shipton and had more recently been a regular editor to both Chris Bonington and Peter Boardman, so it felt rather an honour to have her as mentor.
‘Painted Mountains’ came out in October 1986. At the time I was working for Luke Hughes’ furniture business in Covent Garden and I was sanding some oak table tops when the workshop phone rang and Maggie asked, ‘are you free on October the 18th? You’ve won the Boardman Tasker Prize’. So I will always associate BT with the smell of sawdust and tannin-stained fingers. As for the award ceremony, which in those days took place in London … what an honour to have all three judges there – filmmaker Jim Curran, poet, critic and climber Al Alvarez and as chairman of the judges, the legendary W.H.Murray, whose speech was as dry and Scottish as you would expect. Rumour had it that I was not their initial choice, but I think they changed their minds to encourage a first time writer. Whatever the background politics, I was thrilled to win.
Since 1986 the winning book has always remained a closely guarded secret until the day of the prize-giving ceremony. Three times I have sat with fellow BT Shortlisters, listening anxiously to the chairman’s speech, hoping that I might be the lucky one. (One year in particular, when our family was particularly strapped for cash, I really could have done with £3,000 tax free!) Alas not. But such is the growing prestige of the BT brand, that just to get onto the shortlist gives a book a nice boost.
I have been rather idle on the book-writing front in recent years, but I have had the pleasure, several years running, of interviewing the shortlisted authors. As they have often travelled a long way, sometimes across the Atlantic, on the off chance of winning, it’s nice that each shortlister has a chance to talk a bit about his book. Or her book: the increase in female authors is one of the good ways the prize has broadened over the years. Subject matter, too, has broadened, with less emphasis on hardcore mountaineering, although I felt that the cycling book which won a few years ago – excellent as it was – was only tangentially connected with mountains. With five or six shortlisters to interview, the chats are inevitably short, and I try to keep them light-hearted. I also try to encourage very short readings, because authors are usually hopeless at reading from their own books. However, there are exceptions. For pure boundary-pushing entertainment the prize has to go to Canadian veteran Barry Blanchard reading a passage about being stuck at a high camp on the West Ridge of Everest, during a storm, pleasuring himself with one hand while in his other hand holding the radio to talk to the woman he fancies at base camp. Being Barry, he got away with it. And he did win the Boardman Tasker prize.