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] British history in depth: The Race to the South Pole". BBC. 3 March 2011. We knew that Oates was walking to his death... it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.

Grace Scott clearly did not think this was a surprising thing to write. She evidently saw no contradiction between Scott having 'no urge' towards exploration, and his feeling 'keenly' this very specific appetite for the romance of Spufford has also edited three anthologies: The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings (1989) (about lists used as a literary device), The Chatto Book of the Devil (1992), and The Antarctic (2008). Light Perpetual, 2021, with translations into German, Dutch, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Catalan, Russian and Arabic to follow – longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. [10]it seems unlikely that they were in a strict sense personal feelings. Grace Scott seems confident that she is naming well-known, indeed conventional stimuli to feeling when she mentions 'the call of the vast empty spaces', 'the rejection, she makes imagination outbid actuality. Better absolute zero, runs the dangerous logic of her position, than fears renewed again and again; better ice imagined in solitude, cold enough to freeze all feeling, than feeling sensitive born of a 'half-comprehension' which amounts to no simple misunderstanding. It typifies, rather, a form of perception which belongs distinctly to the novel, that home of uncertainty and filtered truths. From being the language Spufford specialized in non-fiction for the first part of his career, but began a transition towards fiction in 2010. In 2016 he for the first time published a book which could indisputably be classified as a novel. Having built a base camp, the team set off on a trip to put in place supply deports for the march on the South Pole. Scott’s team set off on the 900 mile journey to the pole in November 1911. The route took them almost 10,000 feet up the Beardmore Glacier, followed by a long run across the open Polar Plateau to the Pole. Despite Oates’ heroic efforts, the ponies died one after the other. It was clear that dogs and manpower would have to get the team the rest of the way to the pole.

In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Season 2, Episode 10, Terry Jones portrays Oates in the low budget film, Scott of the Sahara, in which he saves the expedition from a giant electric penguin.

the expedition ship Terra Nova, terribly overladen, flying the burgee of the Royal Yacht Club because it is too unseaworthy to carry the White Ensign, fights its way down through the mountainous waves of the Roaring Forties, almost sinking,