When the coronavirus lockdown hit and travel slowed to a halt, we decided to run the Wanderlust Writing Challenge here on the site.
Rather than a straightforward ‘competition’, the challenge was a two-week travel writing inspiration session, featuring top travel writing tips from author Peter Moore, team Wanderlust’s favourite writing advice and a daily travel writing prompt geared towards helping you craft the perfect story to send in.
The theme was 'kindness of strangers', and we saw it in spades. We received hundreds of entries, read through them (anonymously), and were overwhelmed not just by your creativity, writing ability and storytelling – but also by just how many wonderfully kind, generous and welcoming people you’ve met on the road, and how these people truly do shape our travel experiences.
It was a near-impossible task to narrow down our final shortlist, but here we are. We’ve selected three runners up, to be published on wanderlust.co.uk over the next week, and two winners, who you’ll see published in an upcoming issue of Wanderlust magazine.