Today, Blurb announced the winners of their first Photography.Book.Now competition, and although she’s been sitting on this news for nearly a week, I’m happy to say that Beth has won the Grand Prize of $25,000 for her book, In the Garden. Congratulations Beth! The purpose of the award is to allow the photographer to start or finish any project of their choosing – and what a nice chunk of change to work with.

Beth has always believed that her work would be best presented in book form, and has worked towards that end for many, many years. She has a good eye for design, layout and the grouping of images and will agonise over the smallest of details. So this award is truly well deserved, in my completely biased opinion.

Next week she gets to fly out to San Francisco for the awards ceremony that’s being held at Bimbo’s 365. Check out the history (and the name of the club) here. After that, Blurb takes the work on the road and has organised symposiums and meet-ups at Photokina in Cologne, London and finally New York. There are free tickets to be had for each of the events, just click on the RSVP link for the appropriate city, although the New York symposium looks as if it already has a waiting list.

UPDATE Her flight leaves at 7.30am which makes me feel better about not going with her…