Congratulations to the 2023 Travel Writing Contest winners!
- 1st Place: “The Art of Shelling Peanuts” by Maia Garby ’23
- 2nd Place: “The Witch” by Lily Horne ’23
- 3rd Place: “Irish Goodbyes and Icy Hellos” by Isabel Hoyt-Niemiec ’24
- Honorable Mention: “Dinner for One” by Sarah Raman ’25
- Honorable Mention: “Truths, Travel, and Trash Cows” by Connor Jansen ’23
Special thank you to the Travel Writing Contest sponsors: Cross-Cultural Studies, Dean of Studies, Off-Campus Studies, The Center for Global and Regional Studies, and The Writing Center!
Additionally, many thanks goes out to this year’s internal and external judges, as well as those who played important roles in putting the contest together, including our CGRS student worker, Becca Riess. The external judge this year, Fiona McCrae, recently retired from Graywolf Press after twenty-seven years as director and publisher. Read about Fiona’s many works and accomplishments. Serving as this year’s external judge, Fiona provided explanations on the winning submissions, which you can read below! Lastly, congratulations to the top five winners; your entries were a joy to read, thank you for sharing your adventures with us!
First Place – “The Art of Shelling Peanuts” by Maia Garby ’23
This one stood out to me for the way in which the writer was unafraid to focus on a seemingly small incident and use that to gently yet powerfully convey so much about her specific experience and about travel in general. I found the writer’s prose to be concise and unshowy, and she did not labor over extraneous details. Rather, every detail in the essay worked together to make a convincing whole. In the opening paragraph, she brings us right into the unfolding moment and makes us wait a nice beat to learn where and why she is in Malawi. I felt the full drama inside the shifting, meticulously captured reactions between herself and her host-mother and the joy when the obstinate peanut is finally shelled. As the nut opens, so does the mother’s heart. We understand that the title of the piece, “the Art of Shelling Peanuts” points towards a larger art: that of travel itself—of being humble, of being patient, and of being open. It’s a very under-stated yet touching and affecting essay.
Second Place: “The Witch” by Lily Horne ’23
I found this essay to be very fresh as the writer relates a day trip she took with two friends to visit a witch and her husband. She describes how the couple live in a wholly different way to anything she had previously experienced, and we understand her amazement that this is happening less than two hours from her home. The writer brings the witch to vivid life—her clothes, her approach to living, the beetles she has just discovered, the way she beams with vitality. It all affects the writer very powerfully and by the end of the day she finds herself in an awakened new state where fear “became irrelevant”. However, in an unexpected, but bravely honest ending, the writer indirectly asks herself why she has not taken the opportunity to visit again. For me, this conveyed just how unsettling the visit had been and served to deepen the weight of the whole essay.
Third Place: “Irish Goodbyes and Icy Hellos” by Isabel Hoyt-Niemiec ’24
I enjoyed how this essay nudged me out of my usual resistance to descriptions of the trappings of travel—the luggage, the uber, the airport. By lingering on these stages of farewell and arrival, she shows how rich these moments are, containing as they do so many layers of memory and association. For example, she uses the final uber trip to the airport to think about all her previous uber rides in Amman and why she only has a 4.3 passenger score from the local drivers. She links her departure and subsequent arrival by showing us the side-ways Irish hug she gave her friend Rachel as she left Amman and the one her father gives her at the airport in Norway. Her braiding reminds us very beautifully how we leave parts of ourselves behind wherever we have been, and conversely, how fragments of places we have been travel with us into the future.
Honorable Mentions: “Dinner for One” by Sarah Raman ’25 and “Truths, Travel, and Trash Cows” by Connor Jansen ’23
I thought all five of these essays reached a high standard. I found myself appropriately transported by the observations and descriptions, and am grateful for the places and people that I was able to visit on the page. The pieces shared some characteristics, especially the way in which the students could find themselves thrown off-balance when encountering a new culture. I admired the fact that they were not afraid to share how their assumptions were challenged and or times when they felt lost and disorientated. It was tough to decide between them.
Fiona McCrae