4th July 2012

John Gimlette’s Wild Coast has been long listed for the 2012 Dolman Travel Book of the Year

On being long listed for the award John Gimlette said: “I’m thrilled. Writing can be a lonely business, and so it’s enormously encouraging to hear distant rumbles of approval.”

Gimlette won Wanderlust’s very own Travel Writing competition in 1998, and wrote for Wanderlust about his experiences in Guyana, one of the locations which he explores in Wild Coast.

“Without the Wanderlust award, I’d never have caught the attention of travel editors, and therefore, later, publishers. The article set in the Guianas helped too. On the strength of a Wanderlust commission, a Surinamese government agency agreed to send me into the interior to visit the maroons (the descendants of 18th century runaway slaves). It became a central part of my story,” he added.

Wild Coast depicts Gimlette’s travels through the Guianas and his experiences with the people, including descendants of runaway slaves, civil war survivors and ranchers.

Also long listed for the Dolman Travel Book of the Year were Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ Harlem is Nowhere, Melanie Challenger’s On Extinction, Peter Robb’s Street Fight in Naples, Redmond O’Hanlon’s The Fetish Room, Julia Blackburn’s Thin Paths, Colin Thubron’s To a Mountain in Tibet, Olivia Laing’s To the River and Jacek Hugo-Bader’s White Fever.

Chairman of judges and Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler said: “I’m pleased to see there are so many walking books (A Mountain in Tibet and Thin Paths) and that we’ve ventured into some little known (or little written about) corners of the world, Wild Coast is certainly introducing me to those three South American Guianas.”

The short list will be announced in early August and the winner awarded a £2,500 prize in September 2012.

Read John’s article that started it all off: Guyana: cowboys and Indians

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls…” thundered the Indian, but the jury didn’t hear