The John D. Voelker Foundation and the American Museum of Fly Fishing (AMFF) are pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Robert Traver Fly-fishing Writing Award: “Last Salad on the Gairezi” by George Rogers of Chateaugay, New York. This is a personal story of fly fishing for nonnative trout in Zimbabwe that provides insightful context for destination fishing in a country with a complicated history.
It will be published in the Winter 2025 edition of the American Fly Fisher, the journal of the American Museum of Fly Fishing and is available to read here.
The Traver Award was created in 1994 by Nick Lyons and the Voelker Foundation to encourage and recognize “distinguished original stories or essays that embody the implicit love of fly fishing, respect for the sport, and the natural world in which it takes place.”
Since the Award’s inception, 24 awards have been given for the winning entry. Two anthologies of the Traver Award winning essays were published in two volumes: In Hemingway’s Meadow (2009) and Love Story of the Trout (2010).
personal and philosophic experience
knowledge and protection of the natural world
piscatorial friendships and fun on the water
The 2024 Traver Award will be granted for the winning short work of fiction or nonfiction essay in the English language not previously published commercially in print or digital media. “Short work” means 3,000 words or less. An entry fee of $25 will offset the administrative costs of the award program. Previous Traver Award winners are not eligible.
All entries are due by Midnight, May 31, 2025.
Please send questions to traveraward@gmail.com
Please take careful note of all the submission requirements described below. Entries that do not meet the requirements will not be eligible for judging. All entries will be judged anonymously, so it is essential that the digital file submitted is in the proper format without the author’s name in the document itself. The submitted file must also adhere to the proper file-naming convention.
The Traver Award will be granted for the winning short work of fiction or non-fiction essay in the English language, not previously published commercially in print or digital media. “Short work” means 3,000 words or less. Previous Traver Award winners may not submit.
To be eligible, the Traver Award stories and essays must demonstrate high literary value in one or more of these categories:
The submitted work must be in Times New Roman, 12-point font, with 1.5 spacing and normal (1 inch) margins. The entry must have a title at the top, but no author’s name anywhere in the document.
The file must be saved and uploaded as a PDF file. No other file format will be accepted. The PDF file must be named with the following convention:
Lastname_Firstname_2024TraverEntry.PDF
(for multiple entries, use name_2024TraverEntry1.PDF, name_2024TraverEntry2.PDF, etc.)
All entries must be uploaded through the John D. Voelker Foundation website at www.voelkerfoundation.com/traveraward/ before midnight on May 31, 2025.
A writer may submit multiple entries. Each entry must be entered separately with an entry fee of $25 for each entry.
When the SUBMIT button beneath the entry form is clicked, the PDF file is transmitted and the browser will be immediately directed to a PayPal page for payment. The entrant need not have a PayPal account, but may submit payment with a credit card, debit card, or directly from a PayPal account. You will immediately get an email indicating that the PDF file has been submitted and a separate email via PayPal as a receipt for payment.
We will confirm qualified entries and payment later by email, but it may take a day or two to check to be sure the entry meets requirements.
Upon receipt of both the PDF file and payment, we will save the submitted file and a copy of the file with author’s name changed to an entry number in the filename. Entries will be assigned for anonymous judging by our panel of volunteer judges.
If you have any questions on these submission instructions, you may email us at traveraward@gmail.com.
If you need technical help with file formatting and conversion to PDF, please find assistance locally (ask a teenager!). Technical steps may vary by computer program and operating system.
Files created in Microsoft Word can be converted to PDF as follows: click “File”; click “Save As”; click on the down arrow in the box under the file name where it says “Word Document (*.docx)” and then select PDF (*.PDF) as the file type and click “Save”. The document will be saved to the same folder as a PDF document with the name given and a .PDF suffix.
Past Traver Awards have been collected and published “In Hemingway’s Meadow”. Read the foreword.