The National Outdoor Book Awards have announced their 2025 winners. Previous winners of these awards over the 29 years included TV host David Attenborough and climber Joe Simpson. This year, 17 books spanned 10 categories, ranging from memoirs to hiking guides.
Outdoor Literature
The Outdoor Literature winner was A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst. Her first book tells the true story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, who spent months at sea in a tiny inflatable raft. Like the heroes of older works, fictional and nonfictional, their ship was sunk by a whale, leaving them adrift on the open ocean.
The NOBA judges called the work “storytelling perfection.”
The cover of ‘A Marriage at Sea,’ by Sophie Elmhirst. Photo: NOBA
Journeys
The Journeys category recognizes books that cover a (non-motorized) outdoor journey. The first of two winners this year is John Turner’s Killing the Buddha on the Appalachian Trail. Judges praised his thoughtful take in a crowded field. While he does write about the details of life on the trail, Turner’s writing uses the trail as a vehicle for philosophical musings on aging, failure, and life.
The second winner is North to the Future by Ben Weissenbach. Subtitled An Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska, his book is an autobiographical account of his experience as a backwoods novice who finds himself part of a small research team hiking through the Brooks Range. This account of his 42-day journey explores his work studying Alaska’s changing climate.
History and Natural History
The History/Biography award was also divided into two winners. Diane K. Boyd’s A Woman Among Wolves is a memoir of her four decades studying wolves in remote regions. Publishers Weekly called it a “swashbuckling” account, where her many close encounters with dangerous wildlife are transformed into “tales of adventure and derring-do.”
Boyd radio-collaring a wolf in northwest Montana. Photo: Diane K Boyd
The other History winner was Daniel Light’s treatment of early mountaineering up through the 1920s. Lengthy subtitles being a staple of the genre, his book’s full title is The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering.
The Natural History winner was Born of Fire and Rain: Journey into a Pacific Coastal Forest, by M. L. Herring. A scientist and artist, Herring’s book combines memoir, illustration, and guide in an exploration of Oregon’s Coast Range.
Nature and Environment
Apparently, the competition for this category was tight this year, because NOBA awarded one winner and two silver medalists. The winner, Saving the Big Sky is a collaborative work between photographer Kevin League and authors Bruce A. Bugbee, Robert J. Kiesling, and John B. Wright. The result is a 50-year history of conservation efforts in Montana. Photographs, maps, interviews, and prose record how six million acres of private land were voluntarily protected.
Into Whooperland, one of the silver medalists, likewise combines writing and photos. Michael Forsberg, the author and photographer behind Whooperland, spent five years immersed in the world of that symbol of endangered wildlife, the whooping crane.
People the Planet Needs Now: Voices for Justice, Science, and a Future of Promise, by Dudley Edmondson, features 25 activists, researchers, and educators tackling pressing environmental issues. It focuses on indigenous voices and the work of people of color.
A whooping crane with a chick. Photo: Michael Forsberg
Classics, Children’s, and Others
NOBA singles out works in categories that other awards might not consider, like design and artistic merit. The winner for design this year was Smithsonian Trees of North America. W. John Cress’s arboreal epic runs over 800 pages and rendered one judge “awestruck.”
Another unusual category is that of the classic. Rather than a book published in 2024, this award goes to a work that has stood the test of time. In this case, NOBA chose Reinhold Messner’s The Crystal Horizon, the 1982 account of his first solo Everest summit.
NOBA chose two books in the children’s category, one fiction and one nonfiction. A further three awards went to nature and hiking guides. The “tenacious” Michael Haynes won silver for Hiking Trails of Mainland Nova Scotia. Matt Ritter and Michael Kauffmann’s California Trees outlines all 95 native species, while Nicole Coenen’s Axe in Hand outlines the proper technique for chopping them all down. I was unaware that there was enough to learn about chopping wood to fill an entire book; goes to show what I know.
Finally, NOBA granted the title Work of Significance to Thatcher Hogan for Mapping the Adirondacks. Hogan blended history, guide, and illustration in a way that did not fit neatly into any category, but impressed the judges.
If that wasn’t a long enough list of outdoor and adventure reading, you can also check out the winners of this year’s Banff Mountain Book Awards.
