Spiky outdoors writer Jim Perrin has been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year writer’s award.

Perrin, whose eloquence held the audience at this year’s celebration of the Kinder Scout mass trespass, has The Climbing Essays among the list of six.

Jim Perrin 

Judges described his writing as ‘quirky and rule-breaking’. In his book, he describes describes how he held his 60th birthday party 450ft up on the Old Man of Hoy stack in Orkney.

“I invited lots of people and only three turned up! We saw the sunset and had to get down by moonlight, with the seals singing, it was a kind of ecstasy – you missed a good party.”

First place in the competition carries a £10,000 prize. Others in the shortlist are: Christine Evans’s Growth Rings; Lloyd Jones’s Mr Cassini; T Robin Chapman’s Un Bywyd o Blith Nifer; Gwen Pritchard Jones’s Dygwyl Eneidiau and Llwyd Owen’s  Ffydd Gobaith Cariad. One book in Welsh and one in English will be selected.