Books by Bernadette McDonald

Of all the games mountaineers play, the hardest - and cruellest - is climbing the fourteen peaks over 8,000 metres in winter. Award-winning author Bernadette McDonald tells how Poland's ice warriors made winter their own, perfecting what they dubbed 'the art of suffering'. Winter 8000 is the story of true adventure at its most demanding.

Voytek Kurtyka is one of the greatest alpinists of all time. Born in 1947, he was one of the leading lights of the Polish golden age of mountaineering that redefined Himalayan climbing in the 1970s and 1980s.His visionary approach to climbing resulted in many renowned ascents, such as the complete Broad Peak traverse, the 'night-naked' speed climbs of Cho Oyu and Shishapangma and, above all, the alpine-style first ascent of the West Face of Gasherbrum IV. Dubbed the 'climb of the century', his route on GIV with the Austrian Robert Schauer is - as of 2017 - unrepeated. His most frequent climbing partners were alpine legends of their time: Polish Himalayan giant Jerzy Kukuczka, Swiss mountain guide Erhard Loretan and British alpinist Alex MacIntyre.After repeated requests to accept the Piolets d'Or Lifetime Achievement Award (the Oscars of the climbing world), Kurtyka finally accepted the honour in the spring of 2016. A fiercely private individual, he has declined countless invitations for interviews, lectures and festival appearances, but he has agreed to collaborate with internationally renowned and award-winning author Bernadette McDonald on this long-awaited biography.Art of Freedom is a profound and moving profile of one of the international climbing world's most respected, complex and reclusive mountaineers.

Freedom Climbers is the multi award-winning book by Bernadette McDonald, now available in the UK and Ireland thanks to Vertebrate Publishing. Freedom Climbers tells the story of the extraordinary Polish adventurers who emerged from under the blanket of oppression following the Second World War to become the world's leading Himalayan climbers. Although they lived in a war-ravaged landscape, with seemingly no hope of creating a meaningful life, these curious, motivated and skilled mountaineers built their own free-market economy under the very noses of their Communist bosses and climbed their way to liberation. At a time when Polish citizens were locked behind the Iron Curtain, these intrepid explorers found a way to travel the world in search of extreme adventure - to Alaska, South America and Europe, but mostly to the highest and most inspiring mountains of the world. To this end, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Nepal became their second homes as they evolved into the toughest Himalayan climbers the world has ever known.

Or a tragic - and very public - death in the mountains?Years before, as communism was collapsing and the Balkans slid into chaos, Humar was unceremoniously conscripted into a dirty war that he despised, where he observed brutal and inhumane atrocities that disgusted him.