Jeff Long Wins Grand Prize at Banff Mountain Book Festival 2006

Nov 8, 03:08 PM | New Books

Jeff Long, a friend and mentor has won the coveted Banff Mountain Book Festival for his latest thriller, The Wall. Buy The Wall here.

“The lean, vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose of Long’s big-wall thriller grabs readers by the harness from the opening scene and draws them relentlessly into the mind of an aging rock rat trying to out-climb a mysterious past.” – Competition jury member David Leach, a Victoria, B.C.-based adventure writer and professor.

See The Wall at Banff Mountain Book Festival 2006

Considered one of the foremost writers of climbing fiction, Jeff Long has had a diverse writing career. A novelist, historian, journalist, and screenwriter, he is the best-selling author of seven novels. He has won the Texas Literary Award, the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Novel, the Boardman-Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, and the American Alpine Club’s Literary Award.

Long is a veteran climber who first visited the Himalayas over 35 years ago and has guided tour groups in Tibet. He served three months in Nepalese jails on smuggling charges in 1997, which led to articles about the CIA/Tibetan guerrilla movement and the 1990 democratic revolution in Nepal. His 1992 novel The Ascent described both an Everest disaster and the larger tragedy of genocide in Tibet. Always making room for his notebooks, he claims that for him, “the climbing and expeditions, and the detours through revolutions, jails and landmine-ridden zones were more about the pen than the adrenaline.”

In 1996, Long served as an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe elections supervisor in Bosnia’s first democratic elections, interviewing Bosnians and American troops for Witness, Inc., the human-rights and foreign-aid group he founded.

Set in Yosemite, The Wall is Long’s third climbing novel. It is a tale of two veteran climbers revisiting old haunts, and falling prey to old demons and past loves. “Great mountain tales can take you to the edge of destruction, and that’s where things start to get interesting,” says Long, “because one thing I’ve learned on expeditions and climbs is that there’s nothing like the brink of the abyss to bring out the angels and demons…. In The Wall I wanted to weave a few of these dangers together into a sort of a Gordian knot, one that couldn’t be neatly untied, only cut.”

“Once upon a time, 35 years ago, Hugh and Lewis were Yosemite legends. El Capitan was their holy grail, and their destiny seemed written on its big walls. Here they met the women who married them, then left them. Hugh’s wife mysteriously disappeared into the desert. Lewis’s wife is divorcing him. Now the old friends reunite to climb El Cap one last time and make a fresh start.”
— From the inside cover of The Wall, Jeff Long