We are delighted to announce the 2025 shortlist for Stories For Survival. After receiving record entries and needing an extra couple of weeks to narrow them down, we’ve included 12 entries rather than the usual 10 – such was the high standard. We could have listed 20 and its taken a lot of debate to get here.
The successful authors are:
Barry Saich – The Fear and the Beauty
Bhavananitin Kulkar – Afterlife Whispers
Gurkan Avci – The Dust of Aksehir
Jules Green – A postcard from the past
Keyuan Cao – Not Just Bali
Kitti Nemeth – A Descent into Presence
Nicola Shearer– One Wild Impulse
Renato Bernardo – The Day the Ice Saved Me
Saroj Kumar Senapati – The Secret Language of Kyoto
Sheila Train – When the Sky Turned Blue Again.
Tenise McCoy – Pursuit of Self
Xavier Clot – My Father’s Forest
The winner will be announced here, on the PureTravel website, on Friday 28th November.
Many thanks to everybody who entered – your entry will be published over the coming year on either PureTravel or Explorers Against Extinction, and in so doing will be helping our conservation efforts.
Brief judging notes:
We have no poetry in the shortlist this year. This is partly due to the quality of the 2024 winner pushing the standard up very high and the fact that many poems were not tied in to the theme of the competition.
This is also true of many entries – the writing was excellent but some felt that they had been written and submitted because they were ready rather than the theme being properly thought about.
You can read the Theme details by clicking here.
