Simon McCartney’s mountaineering epic The Bond has won the 2016 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature.

McCartney was announced as the winner of the £3,000 prize at the Boardman Tasker event in Kendal on Friday evening. It is The Bond’s second major success this month, following the book’s win in the Mountain and Wilderness Literature Non-Fiction category at the 2016 Banff Mountain Book Competition.

Announcing the winner, chair of judges Graham Desroy described The Bond as a book that ‘portrays life at the very edge of existence’.

The Bond was published by Vertebrate Publishing in July 2016. Following the announcement of the winner, Vertebrate’s managing director Jon Barton commented: ‘When the manuscript for The Bond came in we knew it was something special. This is a unique story that has made for a once-in-a-lifetime book, particularly when you consider it may never have been written as Simon was incredibly lucky to survive on Denali in 1980.’

Established in 1983, the Boardman Tasker Award commemorates the lives of Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker – outstanding mountaineers and accomplished authors – who disappeared together high on Everest in 1982. It is presented annually to the author or co-authors of an original work that has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature.

Five books were shortlisted for the 2016 prize: Alone on the Wall, by Alex Honnold and David Roberts; Eruption, by Steve Olson; The Bond, by Simon McCartney; Wild Country, by Mark Vallance; and The Maverick Mountaineer, by Robert Wainwright.

Vertebrate Publishing titles have won the Boardman Tasker award on two prior occasions: in 2010, with Rock Athlete by Ron Fawcett and Ed Douglas, and in 2012, with Cold Wars by Andy Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick also won the prize in 2008 for his first book, Psychovertical (Hutchinson, 2008).