An unprecedented four titles by independent Sheffield publisher selected for prestigious international mountain book award

• Wednesday 16 September 2020

Four titles by independent publisher Vertebrate have been selected for the internationally recognised Banff Mountain Book Competition.

Crack Climbing by world-class climber Pete Whittaker; Hard Rock, a definitive representation of British rock climbing by Ian Parnell; Winter 8000, the story of the Polish ice warriors who tackled the world’s highest peaks in winter by Bernadette McDonald; and Sky Dance, John D. Burns’ look at the plight of the Scottish Highland landscape, have been selected as category finalists.

This follows the announcement earlier this month that The Uncrowned King of Mont Blanc, the biography of scientist and mountaineer T. Graham Brown, by Peter Foster, was shortlisted for the 2020 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature.

Sky Dance was selected in the Mountain Fiction and Poetry category; Hard Rock and Crack Climbing were selected for the Guidebooks category and Winter 8000 was selected in the Mountain Literature category. These sit alongside nineteen other titles the award judges consider as representing the best international mountain literature from the last six months.

A key part of the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, the Book Competition celebrates mountain literature in all its forms with $20,000 awarded annually across eight categories, selected by an international jury of writers, adventurers and editors.

The shortlist of category award winners eligible for the award's Grand Prize will be announced in October with the Grand Prize being announced on Thursday 5 November when the category awards will be presented to the winning authors.

Vertebrate titles have scooped Banff category awards on several prior occasions with Art of Freedom by Bernadette McDonald winning the Mountain Literature Non-fiction prize in 2017; The Bond by Simon McCartney winning in the Mountain and Wilderness Literature category in 2016, and One Day as a Tiger by John Porter winning in the Mountaineering History category and then claiming the Grand Prize in 2014.