The editors of Travelers’ Tales announce the winners of the Twelfth Annual Solas Awards for Best Travel Story of the Year. Here’s the bios of the travel writers who snagged the top three spots, and there’s links to their winning entries.

• Grand Prize winner Angelique Stevens collected $1000 for “All the Grains of Sand.” Angelique’s non-fiction can be found in The Chattahoochee Review, Cleaver, Shark Reef, and a number of anthologies. Her essay, “Exposure,” won silver in the Solas Awards for Best Women’s Travel Writing in 2013, and her experimental essay, “Spiral,” was published in the anthology, Friend Follow, Text, which was nominated by Foreword Review for Best Anthology of the Year. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and she finds her inspiration in wandering, being in places that push the boundaries of comfort, experience, knowledge, and hunger. She is currently writing a travel memoir about her trip to South Sudan.
• Aaron Gilbreath won the silver award and $750 for “Crossing Shibuya,” Aaron is a nonfiction writer in Oregon. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Paris Review, Brick, Saveur and Kenyon Review. An editor at Longreads, his book of personal essays, Everything We Don’t Know, came out last year, and he just released his new book This Is: Essays on Jazz.
• Juilene Osborne-McKnight took the bronze and $500 for “Mitty in Rome.” Juilene is the author of four Irish historical novels, I am of Irelaunde, Daughter of Ireland, Bright Sword of Ireland, Song of Ireland, all from MacMillan, and the recent journalistic history of Ireland, The Story We Carry in Our Bones: Irish History for Americans, from Pelican. Since 2013 she has been a travel writer and photographer for Calkins Media in Pennsylvania.

This latest iteration of the Solas Awards attracted 200, which is a healthy response but not so vast that you couldn’t compete for a winning spot in their next travel writing competition.

Check out our Travel Writing Competition page to see when the next one is open for submission.