In its third year, this weekend’s 2025 Sherborne Travel Writing Festival unfolded with dazzling speakers, ecstatic audiences and a relieved curator (that’s me, folks). As the UK’s only annual festival to celebrate travel literature (with a dash of globe-trotting photography), its success is due in part to the intimacy engendered – only 2 1/2 days, only 12 speakers, only 220 seats in a state-of-the-art auditorium in one of the most beautiful towns in England.

Travel writers are bridge builders, venturing out into the world to understand different peoples, cultures and times. Empathy lies at the heart of our work, and the fundamental belief that through better understanding others we can better know ourselves.

With that in mind, I am thrilled, honoured and cock-a-hoop to announce the launch of the annual £10,000 Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing. Entry is open to any full-length, non-fiction (including creative non-fiction) travel book written by a British or EU national and published in English in 2024 or 2025. Books translated into English are eligible; self-published books are not. Entries must be submitted in August and September 2025. Full details and the entry form will soon be found by following this link.

Travel – and hence travel writing – are “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts” wrote Mark Twain. In that vein, works will be judged on their encouragement of understanding between peoples and across societies. As well as the boldness of the author’s ambition and the quality of writing, emphasis will be placed on books that enable readers to cross borders and so to draw together – on the page at least – our divided worlds.

In January 2026 a short list will be announced by judges Colin Thubron, Sara Wheeler and literary agent Emma Paterson. The winning author will be revealed at the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival in April 2026.

Please join me then and now to shout out “Hurrah! Hurrah for the Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing!”