| The Banff Mountain Book Festival is not like other book festivals. There's less body fat, for one thing. There's also a lot more polar fleece, mostly in vest form. And while all book festivals feature authors complaining, here the writers gripe about quite different things, like the need to stay indoors, or on the ground, long enough to write books.
Scottish author Roger Hubank actually apologized, while on stage to accept a Special Jury mention for his new book North, for being "just" an author who made up stories, rather than a free-climber or mountaineer. Finally, there's the distinct language of climbers. Until I heard Lynn Hill speak, I would have thought that "to free the Nose of El Capitan" was something only Peter Sellers or Lewis Caroll might conceive of doing.
Maybe it was the presence of a few dozen Halloween-costumed audience members that gave the festival's opening night its tone of cheerful spontaneity. In fact, the ninth annual Mountain Book awards began with a singalong. Banff Park Warden and Y2Y hiker Karsten Heuer had just been presented with birthday balloons, so the entire hall sang Happy Birthday to the painfully red-faced author of Walking the Big Wild. (Heuer, a U of C ecology grad, will read again in Calgary on Saturday, November 9 at 2 p.m., at McNally Robinson Booksellers).
The festival's grand prize went to The Evidence of Things Not Seen, the autobiography of the late Scottish climber and mountaineer W.H. Murray. The Jon Whyte Award for Mountain Literature went to Above the Clouds, a selection of mountain diaries by Russian mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev, edited by Linda Wylie. Bookreev, who died on Annapurna in 1997, was involved in the notoriously tragic 1996 Everest expedition made famous by the book Into Thin Air.
Festival jury member Dermot Summers joked that Jerry Kobalenko, whose book The Horizontal Everest: Extreme Journeys on Ellesmere Island won the Adventure Travel award, had changed his mind about travelling to the Arctic: "now I know I never want to go there, and especially not with Jerry," said Somers. Somers himself was one of the highlights of the festival – as panelist, author and jurist, the Irish climber and writer was unfailingly witty and gracious, all while voicing his own passionate convictions about vanishing mountain cultures.
The award for Best Book, Mountain Image went to Bruno Engler Photography, a collection of work by the late Canadian Rockies mountaineer, filmmaker and photographer. Special jury awards went to Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World by Lynn Hill with Greg Child, and Light at the Edge of the World by Wade Davis.
Back in Calgary, but still on an outdoorsy note, you can hear Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns read from Grizzly Heart: Living without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka. The pair have been in Russia over five years studying the bear population. They read on November 13 in an event co-sposnored by the Calgary Public Library. Tickets are available at Pages Books on Kensington (283-6655). |
