Congratulations to Gill Meller and Rachel de Thample, whose cookbooks have been shortlisted for this year’s Guild of Food Writers Awards! ROOT, STEM, LEAF, FLOWER (Quadrille, 2020) by Gill Meller is shortlisted for the General Cookbook Award. The category includes cookbooks that 'focus on recipes and the practicalities of cooking’, but can be based on ‘any cuisine, historical period or diet’. ROOT, STEM, LEAF, FLOWER is a cookbook about making the most of the land's bounty in your everyday cooking. With 120 seasonal, vegetarian recipes, Gill’s writing shows us how small changes to the way we cook and eat can lessen our impact on the environment and improve our health and wellbeing. Gill's first book, GATHER (Quadrille, 2016), won the Fortnum & Mason Award for Best Debut Food Book, and TIME (Quadrille, 2018) was shortlisted for the Guild of Food Writers General Cookbook Award. Rachel de Thample’s book, FERMENTATION (Bloomsbury, 2020), which is part of the River Cottage Handbook series, is shortlisted for the Specialist or Single Subject Cookbook Award. This award covers cookbooks that ‘focus on a particular technique, ingredient, food group or single subject’. FERMENTATION shows us how to harness the power of fermentation in our cooking, with recipes on everything from sauerkraut and sourdough, kimchee and kombucha, to pickles and preserves, accompanied by brilliant explanations of how the fermenting process works. ‘Endlessly inventive’, according to The Independent, Rachel is the author of FIVE (Ebury, 2015), TONICS & TEAS (Kyle Books, 2017), MORE VEG, LESS MEAT (Kyle Books, 2018), and GIFTS FROM THE MODERN LARDER (Kyle Books, 2019). The Guild of Food Writers annual Awards ‘celebrate the breadth of knowledge and expertise at work in a thriving creative field’. The winners will be announced virtually this year on Wednesday 23 June at 6pm.