BRITISH GUILD OF TRAVEL WRITERS 2014 NEW TRAVEL WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD

WINNERS OF THE 2014 NEW TRAVEL WRITEROF THE YEAR COMPETITION ARE ANNOUNCED The British Guild of Travel Writers today announced that Mandy Huggins of Cleckheaton near Leeds and Helen Moat of Matlock, Derbyshire, are the winner and runner-up in its fifth annual New Travel Writer of the Year competition. The nation-wide competition is aimed at encouraging fledgling British travel writers who previously have not had paid-for travel features published. Contestants this year were asked to describe in no more than 850 words how a travel experience or destination was brought to life through a person or persons met along the way. Miss Huggins' winning feature, Pavel Rudavin, described her memorable encounter with a Russian bric-a-brac salesman at the Bratislava, Slovakia grave of one Pavel Rudavin, who, he claimed, was his grandfather. Beautifully written, it had an amusing, if somewhat cynical, twist at the end. The winning feature will be published in the April issue of the Guild'sGlobetrotter publication as well as in the spring/summer issue of Traveller magazine, published by Wexas, the Traveller's Club.  The competition was judged by a panel led by BGTW travel writers Nick Dalton and Deborah Stone, both frequent contributors to national newspapers. It also included Mike Unwin, the Guild's 2013 Travel Writer of the Year, the previously mentioned Jonathan Lorie and Amy Sohanpaul, editor of Traveller.