AUTHOR Mandy Sutter from Ilkley has been shortlisted for the New Welsh Writing Awards 2016: University of South Wales Prize for Travel Writing, which was announced at an event at the Hay Festival on June 1.

Mandy is now in the running to win the top prize along with travel writer John Harrison and PhD student Nathan Llywelyn Munday, which will be announced at a ceremony at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff on July 7.

The Prize celebrates the best short form travel writing (5,000-30,000 words) from emerging and established writers based in the UK and Ireland plus those who have been educated in Wales. The judges are New Welsh Review editor Gwen Davies and award winning travel writer Rory MacLean.

First prize is £1,000 cash, e-publication by New Welsh Review on their New Welsh Rarebyte imprint in 2016 and a positive critique by leading literary agent Cathryn Summerhayes at WME. Second prize is a weeklong residential course in 2016 of the winner’s choice at T? Newydd Writing Centre in Gwynedd, north Wales. Third prize is a weekend stay at Gladstone’s Library in Flintshire, north Wales. All three winners will also receive a one-year subscription to the magazine.

The shortlist comprises two books and a long-form essay in uplifting prose set in Europe, Africa and South America. In Mandy Sutter’s ‘Bush Meat: As My Mother Told Me’, a Nigerian domestic scene unfolds, where subtle and interdependent racial and class issues are seething under a tight lid. John Harrison’s book tracks the rise and fall of the pre-Columbian city of Tiwanaku in Bolivia, highest city in the ancient world and the hub of a trading empire stretching from Chile to Peru. And European creation myths are the theme in Nathan Llywelyn Munday’s map of the highs and lows of the grand narrative as he treks with his father through the Pyrenees.

The public will now be able to vote for the winner, which will be revealed on 7 July. For more information visit http://www.newwelshwritingawards.com/best-travel-book-poll/