Dolman Award winner announced
7th July 2009
Alice Albinia has won the Dolman Best Travel Book Award for 2009 for her book Empires Of The Indus.
The award, Britain’s only prize for travel books, is organised by the Authors’ Club. The £2,500 cash prize for the winner is donated by the Reverend Dr William Dolman.
Empires Of The Indus charts the history of the Indus river as Albinia travels along its 2,000-mile course.
Albinia had the idea for the book during a two and a half year stint as a journalist in India.
Empires Of The Indus has already won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Foundation Special Prize for Non-Fiction.
The other shortlisted books this year were:
The Island That Dared by Dervla Murphy – the pioneering travel writer takes her daughter and grandchildren on a whirlwind tour of Cuba
Bandit Roads by Richard Grant – an exploration of Mexico’s macho Sierra Madre
Fishing In Utopia by Andrew Brown – Brown revisits Sweden twenty years after he lived there as a child
Street Without A Name by Kapka Kassabova – Bulgarian author Kassabova examines her relationship with her homeland as she revisits the places of her youth and the country’s tourist sites
Travels On The Dance Floor by Grevel Lindop – writer takes up salsa dancing and becomes so entranced he journeys to its roots in the Americas
John Lucas’s 92 Archarnon Street won last year's Dolman Best Travel Book Award.
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