Double awards delight for Highland author
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An Ardersier writer has been nominated for two prestigious writing awards.
Sarah Douglas (47) has been shortlisted for both the Edward Stanford travel awards and The Great Outdoors magazine book of the year.
Her name appears alongside TV presenter and author Michael Palin and Somerset Maugham Award prize winner Philip Marsden.
Ms Douglas, the author of Just Another Mountain said she was “very, very pleased” with the achievement, in a life where she feels she had sometimes let herself down.
“I feel super blown away, particularly since my book is shortlisted alongside the likes of Michael Palin and Philip Marsden,” she said. “It’s quite a scoop for just a mother from a small village in the north of Scotland.
“I’ve mostly been a bit chaotic in my life, so it’s amazing that I now have something good to actually, genuinely, feel proud of.”
A first-time author, Ms Douglas’s heart-rendering story of love and loss as she scaled mountains across Scotland and across the globe was published in June.
Since then she has gone on to receive acclaim from reviewers and readers.
One review even included it onto the Forbes 100 Gift List. Last year she was interviewed by TV presenter Lorraine Kelly about her tale of making hash of life before and after her mum died from breast cancer when Ms Douglas was only 24.
She said: “Climbing helped me escape the thoughts in my head. But it was never enough, there
always had to be a bigger
mountain, a bigger challenge, a bigger escape.”
After climbing Kilimanjaro she began to climb every munro in Scotland. She learned to accept her own troubled past, finding the strength to overcome her grief – and, ultimately, to carry on in the face of her own cancer diagnosis 20 years later.
Ms Douglas said: “What I have learned is that the blueprint of who you are is mapped out in the people who are around you.”
As well as writing her book, Ms Douglas started a blog – called Smashing Cancer in the Face – as she battled cancer.
She says that if there is to be a second book, then it would be about her journey through that period of her life.
Just Another Mountain by Sarah Jane Douglas is published by Elliott & Thompson.
