The Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year award went last night to Silvia Vasquez-Lavado for In the Shadow of the Mountain, a memoir in which she weaves together her ascent of Everest, her traumatic childhood in Peru, and the journey she made as an immigrant to the United States.

  Three other prizes were handed over in the slimmed-down Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. Tony Wheeler, co-founder of the guidebook publisher Lonely Planet, was honoured for making “an outstanding contribution to travel writing” by “inspiring travellers on a shoestring”; Emma Willsteed was named Bradt New Travel Writer of the Year for a piece about Connemara, in the west of Ireland; and Hannah Gold picked up the Children’s Travel Book of the Year award for The Lost Whale.