The British Guild of Travel Writers today announced that Mandy Huggins of Cleckheaton near Leeds and Helen Moat of Matlock, Derbyshire, are the winner and runner-up in its fifth annual New Travel Writer of the Year competition.

The nation-wide competition is aimed at encouraging fledgling British travel writers who. Contestants this year were asked to describe in no more than 850 words how a travel experience or destination was brought to life through a person or persons met along the way.

Miss Huggins' winning feature, Pavel Rudavin, described her memorable encounter with a Russian bric-a-brac salesman at the Bratislava, Slovakia grave of one Pavel Rudavin, who, he claimed, was his grandfather. Beautifully written, it had an amusing, if somewhat cynical, twist at the end.

Working as the personal assistant to the managing director of a small engineering company, Miss Huggins spends as much time as possible travelling to places as diverse as Cuba, Russia, Africa, America, India and
Japan. She attributes her love of travel to her mother, who was posted with the WAAF in Egypt during World II, and her RAF father who later "spent all his money on wine and travel". She was a finalist in the 2013 Bradt
Guides/Independent on Sunday travel-writing competition.

Mrs Moat's feature, Dimuthu, poetically describes the reactions she and a new Sri Lankan friend had to each other's countries. They met when the author, a teacher, spent a week on a British Council-funded stay in a
Kandy school followed by another week's stay with the family of her host teacher, Dimuthu, who then visited her in England.

Mrs Moat, who says she spent her childhood "squashed between siblings in my dad's MorrisMinor, travelling the length and breadth of Ireland", has since travelled extensively in Europe, as well as in North America, East Africa and Asia.

Since the Guild competition she has been commissioned to write a Bradt Slow Travel Guide on the Peak District, a success she largely attributes to being the runner-up in a previous Guild New Travel Writer competition.

"My BGTW runner-up win in 2011 played a big part in getting me to this point," she says. "The judges' detailed feedback gave me the confidence to pursue travel writing and go on to win/or be placed in other writing competitions." She was, for example, highly commended in the 2013 BBC Wildlife Travel Writing Competition, and her travel stories can now be read on her blog: http://moathousemoathouseblogspotcom.blogspot.co.uk/ 

The winning feature will be published in the April issue of the Guild's Globetrotter publication as well as in the spring/summer issue of Traveller magazine, published by Wexas, the Traveller's Club. She will be given a one-year, free membership in Wexas worth £85 and a £50 travel voucher as well as enrolled in an intensive London-based Travellers' Tales travel writing course led by Guild member Jonathan Lorie. The runner-up will also be given a one-year free membership in Wexas and a £50 travel voucher plus a selection of five travel books written by BGTW members. Her feature, as well as that of Miss Huggins, will be available for viewing on the Guild website: www.bgtw.org

A panel led by BGTW travel writers Nick Dalton and Deborah Stone, both frequent contributors to national newspapers, judged the competition. It also included Mike Unwin, the Guild's 2013 Travel Writer of the Year, the previously mentioned Jonathan Lorie and Amy Sohanpaul, editor of Traveller.

The 54-year-old British Guild of Travel Writers is an organisation of 270 professional travel writers, editors, photographers and broadcasters. For more information contact the Guild Secretariat, secretariat@bgtw.org, 020 8144 8713 or visit www.bgtw.org