Its a prize given to the best mountain books - the equivalent of the Booker for Literary Fiction or the Whitbread or T.S. Eliot awards for Poetry, the Orange Prize for women...

These prizes tend to benefit not just the winner but also the shortlisted writers who get added exposure and often displayed in bookshops.

There's a whole heap of prizes for different literary ouvres but the Boardman Tasker judges seem to have a pretty good eye for a decent mountain read.

Usually publishers decide which books to submit for prizes although Boardman Tasker is unlimited per publisher which makes way for some interesting submissions, in other prizes publishers can be limited to 3 or 4 or even only one entry.

Its worth remembering that just because something isn't on the list doesn't mean that it isn't any good, the publisher might just not have submitted it.