New Welsh Review has this week announced the winner of its New Welsh Writing Awards 2016: University of South Wales Prize for Travel Writing. The Prize celebrates the best short form travel writing from emerging and established writers based in the UK and Ireland; its judges New Welsh Review editor Gwen Davies and award-winning travel writer Rory MacLean.
After shortlisting at Hay Festival in May (watch the video filmed on location at Gladstone's Library here), Mandy Sutter has been revealed as the winner of the top prize for her re-telling of her mother’s story growing up in mid-1960s white Nigeria, Bush Meat: As My Mother Told Me. Mandy was awarded a cheque for £1,000 by judge Rory MacLean and her winning entry will be published by New Welsh Review on their New Welsh Rarebyte imprint this autumn.
Watch the Bush Meat: As My Mother Told Me animation video here.
NWR editor and Prize judge Gwen Davies said:
"Travel writing creates bridges of understanding across physical and imaginative borders, between our own and ‘other' cultures as well as between the past and the present. Mandy Sutter's Nigeria rises like a mirage from her story as a child there in the mid-1960s; her use of fiction techniques such as empathy and multiple viewpoints, especially her mother's adult experience as an ex-pat negotiating her own family's conforming views of race and class, create a complete arc of innovative concision."
Co-judge Rory MacLean said:
"Mandy Sutter's Bush Meat triumphs, in its lean prose and true dialogue, in its disarming humour, in its evocation of a family divided by sexism and racism in 1960s white Nigeria. In her story, Mandy stitches together the threads of memory to create a moving tapestry of lost life, building bridges of understanding across time and place, enhancing literature's ever-changing, ever-supple genre."
Mandy Sutter grew up in Kent but now lives in Ilkley with her partner and a large black dog called Fable. She has co-written two books about the lives of Somali women, published in 2006 and 2007 and her first novel, Stretching It, was published in 2013. She has also published three poetry pamphlets with independent presses.
Second prize was awarded to Cardiff University PhD student Nathan Llewelyn Munday for his piece Seven Days, A Pyrenean Trek that uses European creation myths to map the highs and lows of the grand narrative. A deceptively simple hike with his father becomes a timeless, scholarly, rich, human, engaging and heartfelt Odyssey. Nathan wins a week-long residential course of his choice at T? Newydd Writing Centre in Gwynedd, North Wales.
Third prize went to travel writer John Harrison for his piece The Rains of Titikaka that tracks the rise and fall of the pre-Columbian city of Tiwanaku in Bolivia, highest city in the ancient world and the hub of a trading empire stretching from Chile to Peru. John wins a weekend stay here at Gladstone’s Library!
Find out more about the New Welsh Writing Awards here or join the conversation on Twitter using #newwelshawards.