For ten years the editors of Travelers’ Tales have run a writing competition to find the best travel story of the year: The Solas Awards. Over those years, thousands of stories have come across their desks, from writers famous and unknown, covering all corners of the globe with stories of adventure and discovery, love and loss, humor and absurdity, grief and joy. In this collection appear all of the top prize winners of the last ten years, stories that bring readers along for journeys that are inspiring, uplifting, and, very often, transformative. These tales are powerful, moving testaments to the richness of our world, its cultures, people, and places.
In this book, readers will:
Deposit a loved one’s ashes in a Bolivian River
Find the Celtic soul you never knew you had in rural Ireland
Grope through the maze of sorcery and madness in Cameroon
Rediscover your sense of self on a return to Russia after many years away
Follow the spirit of John Wesley Powell down the Grand Canyon in Arizona
Engage loss and the specter of death in Mexico
Face your deepest fears alone in an Alaskan winter
Encounter the realities of prostitution in Thailand
Absorb the rhythms and soul of Flamenco in Spain
Fall in love with a home in rural France and make it your own…
and much more
Jadual kandungan
Fishing with Larry
Tom Joseph
Bolivia
Red Lights and a Rose
Joel Carillet
Bangkok
The Bamenda Syndrome
David Torrey Peters
Cameroon
Ashes of San Miguel
Tawni Vee Waters
Mexico
The Memory Bird
Carolyn Kraus
Poland
Protected
Peter Wortsman
Germany
Into the Hills
Matthew Crompton
India
Flight Behavior
Amy Butcher
Nebraska
The Tea in Me
Bill Giebler
India
Oranges and Roses
Amy Gigi Alexander
Paris
Flamenco Form
Nancy Penrose
Spain
Ghost on Ice
Cameron Mc Pherson Smith
Alaska
Discalced
Bruce Berger
Baja
We Wait for Spring, Moldova and Me
Kevin Mc Caughey
Moldova
Masha
Marcia De Sanctis
Moscow
Spirals: Memoir of a Celtic Soul
Erin Byrne
Ireland
Barren in the Andes
Laura Resau
Ecuador
Fish Trader Ray
Lisa Alpine
The Amazon
Remember This Night
Katherine Jamieson
Guyana
Love and Lies in Iran
Mario Kaiser
Iran
Castles in the Sky
Jennifer Baljko
Barcelona
Philomen and Baucis
Pamela Cordell Avis
France
The Empty Rocker
Kathleen Spivack
Amsterdam
The Train at Night
Gina Briefs-Elgin
Aboard Amtrak
Beneath the Rim
Michael Shapiro
Grand Canyon
Mysterious Fast Mumble
Bruce Berger
Baja
Storykeepers
Erin Byrne
Paris
Moving West, Writing East
Tom Miller
US/Mexico Border
From the Ashes
James Michael Dorsey
Cambodia
Inside the Tower
Keith Skinner
Monterey Peninsula
Deep Travel, Notre Dame
Erin Byrne
Paris
The Good Captain
Glenda Reed
The Pacific Ocean
The Train to Harare
Lance Mason
Botswana
Mengenai Pengarang
James O’Reilly, publisher of Travelers’ Tales, was born in Oxford, England, and raised in San Francisco. He’s visited fifty countries and lived in four, along the way meditating with monks in Tibet, participating in West African voodoo rituals, rafting the Zambezi, and hanging out with nuns in Florence and penguins in Antarctica. He travels whenever he can with his wife and their three daughters. They live in Leavenworth, Washington and Palo Alto, California, where they also publish art games and books for children at Birdcage Press (birdcagepress.com).
Larry Habegger, executive editor of Travelers’ Tales, has visited more than fifty countries and six of the seven continents, traveling from the Arctic to equatorial rainforests, the Himalayas to the Dead Sea. In the 1980s he coauthored mystery serials for the San Francisco Examiner with James O’Reilly, and for thirty-one years wrote a syndicated newspaper column, World Travel Watch. Habegger regularly teaches travel writing at workshops and writers conferences, is a principal of the Prose Doctors (prosedoctors .com), and editor in chief of Triporati.com, a destination discovery site. He lives with his family on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.
Sean O’Reilly is editor-at-large for Travelers’ Tales. He is a former seminarian, stockbroker, and prison instructor who lives in Virginia with his wife and three of their six children. He’s had a lifelong interest in philosophy and theology, and is the author of How to Manage Your Destructive Impulses with Cyber Kinetics and Authority. He is also CEO and founder of the Auriga Distribution Group, Johnny Upright, Fifth Access, and Redbrazil.com, a bookselling site.