Paula Young Lee, formerly of Houlton and member of Houlton High School Class of 1982, is a winner in the 2014 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition, taking gold in the travel book category for “Deer Hunting in Paris: A Memoir of God, Guns, and Game Meat (Travelers Tales/Solas House Press, 2013.”
The awards are named for Lowell Thomas, acclaimed broadcast journalist, prolific author and world explorer during five decades in journalism.
This is the 30th annual competition sponsored by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. Winners of the awards, the most prestigious in the field of travel journalism, were announced Sept. 16 at the SATW convention, held in Iceland.
The competition drew 1,177 entries and was judged by members of the faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
In honoring Lee’s work, the judges said: “Eudora Welty, who believes all good writing must have it, speaks of the sound of a voice. And what a voice here! Resonant with images and descriptions, detailed observation and reporting, it soars — from a coot recipe to church suppers. Paula Young Lee saw a lot of the latter because her father, who came to this country from Korea with her mother after the war, served as a Methodist minister in various small town churches in Maine. Growing up there instilled in her a love of hunting, a match for her interest in cooking.”
