Pullinger - Once upon a time there was a traveller: Asham award-winning stories

We know the adages about travel, the most famous surely being Ralph Waldo Emersons Life is a journey, not a destination and Leo Tolstoys theory about fiction, marvellously, economically expressed as: All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. So it seemed wed be on to a good thing if we combined stories and travel as the theme for Viragos second book with Asham, and Carole Buchan from the Asham Literary Endowment Trust to whom this book and authors owe much thanks agreed. Happily, joining me as judges were two women who represent some of the finest of travel writing and of literature: Sara Wheeler and Helen Dunmore.

We were given a longlist of forty stories and off we three went on one of the best kinds of journeying: armchair travelling. Unsurprisingly for a book about travel, many of the stories are on the move: on planes; on trains; on the road; and even on the school run. There are mischievous outings; missions to save a life (possibly); memories of childhood journeys and a story about discovering that staying home is sometimes best. We read and emailed, shortlisted and made notes.

When at last we met to make our list of twelve writers and to choose our winners, we did not have an easy time of it as there are many stories of a very fine quality. Says Helen Dunmore, Like travel itself, these stories are full of the unexpected. I love the polish and boldness of the writing, and congratulate the authors.

But we did eventually come to an agreement and chose a spare and brilliant story set in South Africa, The Journey to the Brothers Farm by Pippa Gough, as our First Prize winner. We judged the stories without any knowledge of even the authors names, but now that I can read Pippa Goughs biography I see that she spent most of her childhood in Africa. She writes evocatively of the land and the haze of the heat, the dust and the grass roofs warming in the early morning sun. As she leads us slowly, reluctantly, down the road to the brothers farm, we are torn between desperately wanting and never wanting to know whats at the end of the track There we find a place where brutality and justice are sometimes too close to separate. Brilliantly handled and powerfully, simply told.

Our Second Prize winner is by Dolores Pinto. Her story, Where Life Takes You, is about a young woman who has somehow ended up in Whitby, a small seaside town, where she doesnt belong, where she feels different, where she knows everyone is looking at her. She wants to travel back to London to walk unnoticed between tall buildings. How can this place be where she will stay? It is a beautiful, deceptively slight story about longing, loss, love, and finding out what home is.

The Elephant in the Suitcase by Deepa Anappara is a fantasy or it is reality? about a forest guard working for ten years in a place full of shrieking birds, wild dogs, sambars and a very pesky nocturnal elephant who makes him see it is high time to leave! Playful and truthful, it is wonderfully unexpected and winner of our Third Prize.

And we decided to award an Honourable Mention to Pay Day by Dawn Nicholson, a heart-breaking story about a teenager who sacrifices everything to send his young brother off on an adventure, to save his life. Powerful and touching.

Sara Wheeler expresses all our pleasure with the final selection: I so enjoyed reading these richly diverse stories. They took me to many new places, real and imaginary, and constantly confounded my expectations. Bravo les filles.

The tradition with Asham is to invite a few established writers to publish alongside the debut ones. Here is Susie Boyts glorious story set in an old peoples home with a pair whove come an awfully long way from the Dudley Hippodrome; Helen Dunmores startling and disturbing glimpse of youth as it passes through an airport on its way to fight in Afghanistan; and an extract from Angela Carters beguiling 1967 novel, The Magic Toyshop, about a young girls journey away from innocence. Ultimately, I suppose, that a journey from innocence is perhaps what all journeys are about. But no one does it the same way and this is a great book of talent with laughter, ruefulness, sadness, wisdom, absurdity, curiosity, melancholy all packed up and ready to go.

Lennie Goodings

Publisher, Virago