In presenting Joe Simpson with the 1988 Boardman Tasker Award, Janet Adam Smith said that Touching the
Void was ‘a story far beyond what any respectable fiction writer would dare to invent. It’s all true but the
telling has all the force of...
Joe Simpson and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, had just reached the top of a 21,000-foot peak in the Andes when disaster struck. Simpson plunged off the vertical face of an ice ledge, breaking his leg. In the hours that followed, darkness fell...