‘In the Black Mountains of Pakistan, the discovery of an unconscious, unknown man is the first snowball in an avalanche of chaos. The head of the village is beset with problems – including the injured stranger – and failing to find his way out. His daughter receives a love letter and incurs her father’s wrath. A lame boy foretells disaster, but nobody is listening. Trapped in terrible danger, a wolf-dog is battling ice and death to save a soldier’s life. Beaten by her addict husband for bearing him only daughters, a woman is pregnant again – but can this child save her?
All the while, the spirits of the mountains keep a baleful eye on the doings of the humans. In a land woven with myth, chained with tradition and afflicted by ongoing conflict and the march of progress, can the villagers find a way to co-exist with nature that doesn’t destroy either of them?’
Feryal Ali Gauhar’s third novel, An Abundance of Wild Roses, has won the prestigious 2025 Banff Mountain Book Award for Mountain Fiction and Poetry. The acclaimed storyteller weaves a lilting tale of the degradation of life, loss and trauma; leaving her readers both enraptured and imbrued with her poetic melancholy and evocative wordplay.
A learning organization possessing an extraordinary legacy of excellence in artistic and creative endeavors, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity had earlier announced 29 finalists in the 2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the festival showcased books in eight categories, all centered on mountain culture and adventure.
In its announcement, the organization stated: “This year, the prescreening committee read 142 submitted works from authors in 11 countries in the following categories: Mountain Literature (non-fiction), Mountain Fiction and Poetry, Mountain Image, Guidebooks, Mountain Article, Environmental Literature, Adventure Travel, and Climbing Literature… It’s time to celebrate the writers who have inspired us with their stories of courage, discovery, and the wild. From the frozen heights of Denali to glowing night skies and thawing Arctic landscapes, this year’s Book Award winners take us on journeys of adventure, reflection, and resilience.”
Kate Neville, 2025 Book Competition Jury, shared her views: “At once harsh, haunting, and mythic, An Abundance of Wild Roses takes us into the mountains of Pakistan to the lives unfolding in and around the “Village of a Hundred Sorrows.” In an unforgiving environment, it is the violence wrought by humans that creates the most suffering. With bold, poetic writing that weaves the lives of spirit-beings with troubled village life, Feryal Ali-Gauthar attends to the intertwined damage of the world, linking the losses of snow leopard and markhor and cedar forests with the burdened lives of those rendered powerless by unyielding social strictures, fear, and grief.”
Feryal Ali-Gauhar is a teacher, filmmaker, actor, writer and activist. Her first novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August, was a bestseller in India; her second novel, No Space for Further Burials, won the Patras Bokhari award and was translated into several European languages. Her third novel, An Abundance of Wild Roses, was written with the assistance of the Roger Deakin award for environmental activism. Ali-Gauhar has served as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Population Fund, and has worked extensively with women and children subjected to violence and sexual crimes. She spent forty years in the development sector, focusing on poverty, marginalisation and political inclusion. For the past fifteen years, she has worked on the two largest dams in South Asia in the area of cultural heritage management. Ali-Gauhar has been imprisoned twice by two military regimes in Pakistan. She lives in Lahore with twenty-four rescued animals, including several donkeys, a turtle and four dogs.
In her acceptaince speech, Feryal thanked the jury of the Banff Mountain Festival for honouring her work with this year’s awardfor best fiction. She expressed: “I thank the people of Banff for sponsoring the prize. I would also Iike to express my deep gratitude to the people of the small village where I lived while learning about the lives of both humans and animals, striving to survive the harshness of a degraded environment as well as the laws of patriarchy where the weak are hunted and the strong are the hunters. I have chosen to write the stories of the hunted, so that we can confront immense suffering and vow to stop the violence, to stop the killing, to stop the destruction of this planet and all that belongs to it.”
Adding, she said: “I write from a place of loss – the denuding of our forests, the depletion of our water sources, the starvation of the soil, the starvation of the soul in a world where hunger stalks every land. An Abundance of Wild Roses is a story of hope set amongst the highest mountains on earth, where the most vulnerable lives, those of women, young girls, and animals, become the strength we all seek in times of despair. I am deeply indebted to my editor, Ellah Wakatama, for her gentle guidance and unwavering faith. That this magnificent team of men and women at Canongate should choose to publish this story is a source of infinite courage and conviction, in my words, in my work, in the stories I want to tell.”
A feminist lens on human and environmental degradation, An Abundance of Wild Roses by Feryal Ali-Gauhar, Canongate (UK, 2024) is available at Waterstones and Amazon in hard cover as well as paperback.
