Thanks Amy Jane (Rab Athlete who presented the award) and thanks to Rab for their continuing support of mountain culture and for sponsoring this award.
It is very humbling to walk through the reading room and see all the books submitted to this year’s festival. One also senses the enormous logistical task of the judging process. Thanks to everyone who participated in that process, from the volunteer readers on the front lines to the members of the jury, Jennifer Lowe-Anker, Kate Harris (gestures toward Kate at the podium) and especially to Tony Whittome for his kind words about my work, which mean the world to me.[1]
Thanks to everyone who works so hard to make this festival happen, especially the people I’ve worked with personally: Karolina, Margaret, and Kenna, and of course Jo Croston who makes this whole world spin.
I’ve been going to the mountains for over fifty years and I realized that although I’ve roped up with dozens of people, I’ve done most of my climbing with just three partners, John McInerney, Jim Pinter-Lucke, and Charlie Sassara. Very grateful for their good judgment, friendship, and shared laughs. Also grateful for my friend Ralph Baldwin, who I haven’t been out with a lot, but when it counted, his cool head definitely saved my life when things looked pretty bleak.
My wife has the double misfortune to be married to a climber and writer. The climber lives in the mountains and the writer, this one anyway, spends a lot of time in his own head.
I was born and raised in the American midwest, lots of brothers and sisters. They don’t quite get what I do in the mountains and are generally . . . disinterested about what I have to say in most of my writing. There’s little evidence they read any of it.
One day my wife got a phone call from my adult niece. She said that she had just read my book of climbing essays, Warnings Against Myself. “Oh my God,” she told my wife, “I had no idea. I am so sorry.” So perhaps I owe her an apology myself. I love you, Aisha.
There’s a line from the great writer Leonard Cohen that I’ve taken to heart ever since I first encountered it: “I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.”
Of course, he is not a minor writer, just a modest one. I, however, am a minor writer with a small province. But I believe that if one pays close attention to the specific, works hard, loves language and loves one’s subject, with a little luck we may approach the universal.
Thank you~
[1] “This powerful, exact, and beautifully written article explores the relationship between photograph, subject, and observer in a series of images of climbers who have died in the mountains. Its spare prose and flattened affect at first recalls art criticism, or even the forensics of an autopsy, but this is not the whole story: it soon modulates into something questing, passionate and deeply personal which will remain in the mind of the reader. In short compass this is an extraordinary literary achievement.”- Tony Whittome, 2023 Book Competition Jury
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