The annual Lakeland Book of the Year Awards go from strength to strength each year, with a record 70 entries this 25th anniversary year. The Awards were founded in 1984 by Cumbrian writer Hunter Davies, with Cumbria Tourism and are now a major fixture in the Cumbrian arts and tourism diary. The winners of the five different categories were announced at a special Awards Lunch at Bowness on Windermere on Tuesday 7 July, by the judges – Hunter Davies himself, broadcaster Fiona Armstrong and Cumbrian author Kathleen Jones:

- The Saint & Co People and Business category: Ivver Sen by Keith Richardson and Keith Bowen,
- The Bill Rollinson Prize for Landscape and Tradition: A Guide to the Stone Circles of Cumbria by
Robert WE Farrah
- The Bookends Prize for Arts and Literature: Inside Story – Selected Poems of William Scammell, edited
by Christopher Pilling
- The David Winkworth Prize for Illustration and Presentation: Capturing the Mountains – The Lake
District through the lens of the Abraham Brothers by Susan Steinberg
- The Michael Berry Prize for Guides, Walks and Places: Another Country – A Guide to the Children’s Books of the Lake District and Cumbria by James Mackenzie

The overall winner of the title of Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year went to Keith Richardson for Ivver Sen – a richly deserved win by a book which not only cast a spotlight on a way of life fast disappearing in the Lake District, but was also well-written, beautifully illustrated and superbly designed.

To mark this anniversary year there was also a special prize for the ‘Best Cumbrian Book Ever’, sponsored by Cumbria Life magazine – with the public voting for the winners from a shortlist of five or six books/poems in four genres – fiction, poetry, non-fiction and children’s. First, the judges announced their own winners in the respective sectionsas Margaret Forster’s novel Shadow Baby, Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils, Alfred Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. However the public vote was not quite the same: they agreed on Wordsworth and Wainwright, but for the best Cumbrian fiction winner was John Murray’s Radioactivity, and best children’s book Catherine Cannon’s Felix the Fast Tractor. Despite all that has been written by Cumbrian writers over the past two hundred years, the overall winner came out as Wordsworth, for Daffodils. Let that be a call to arms for Cumbrian writers: let’s not wait another century or more to trump old Wordsworth!