The Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year award went last night to the Iraqi architect turned journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad for A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War, his account of of what happened to Iraq, then Syria, after the US invasion of March 2003.

Updated March 24:
I had time the other day to mention only Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. Other winners in the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards were: Abraham Verghese, who took the Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place with The Covenant of Water; Sinean Callery, who was named Bradt Travel Guides New Travel Writer of the Year for an article about her time working as a guide in Norway; Mya-Rose Craig, whose account of bird migrations, Flight, was Children’s Travel Book of the Year; and the geographer, author and television presenter Nicholas Crane, who received the Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing.