Travel Writer of the Year - again!

For the past three days I've been jumping up and down inside like Olive in Little Miss Sunshine, because on Saturday night I won the Australian Society of Travel Writers' most prestigious award: Travel Writer of the Year.

Aloft in Turkey - instead
 of attending awards night 

It's a big honour and feels so good to be recognised by my peers. Freelance travel writing can be a lonely art sometimes - most of the time we travel solo and there's all that solitary writing time - but moments like this remind me that I'm part of a wonderful community of writers and travel media people which has been my surrogate family for more than 20 years.

The awards are open only to members of the ASTW, i.e. only to professional travel writers, so there's some stiff competition. The other two finalists for this award were actually two of my friends; one of them, Catherine Marshall, won the award last year AND the year before.

I've won this award four times before myself, but the last time was in 2013 so I was pleasantly surprised just to be a finalist this year. I certainly didn't expect to win. I still can't really believe it.

It's judged on a portfolio of each writer's three best published stories for the year, so I thought I'd share the links to mine here, all published in Traveller, in The Sydney Morning Herald:

Tamang kids, Nepal

High hopes in the Himalayas: my Nepal cover story about a new 15-day trek run by Intrepid Travel to help people in the Langtang Valley recover from the devastating 2015 earthquakes.

The call of the high: an essay about why we climb mountains, seek out rooftop bars and choose window seats when we travel.

Kyushu's sacred mountain hike: a story about a 10-day walk I did late last year on the remote Kunisaki Peninsula in Kyushu with Walk Japan.

As fate - and an assignment from Traveller - would have it, I was in Turkey until yesterday and couldn't attend the ASTW awards night in Cairns last weekend. So the ASTW Committee asked me to send my acceptance speech by video. Here's the result (I'm better in print!), shot in a little antique shop and cafe in Istanbul where I'd stopped for a tiny cup of Turkish coffee:

Big thanks again to the ASTW and the judges and award sponsor Visit USA, and to everyone who sent lovely messages via Facebook, which made my brief layover in Singapore's Changi airport the best ever. And now that I'm home I can jump up and down on the outside too.