Hulse and O’Sullivan Win Travel Journalism Awards

Jerry Hulse, travel editor of The Times, has been awarded first place for the best newspaper article in the United States and Canada travel category in the fourth annual Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition sponsored by the Society of American Travel Writers. The winning article was his story on Washington’s San Juan Islands. The judges pronounced his story “full of real people and places you’d want to get to know. All travel writing should combine such graces with such a solid foundation of facts.”

Bob O’Sullivan, a free-lance writer from Canoga Park and a regular contributor to The Times Travel Section, was the grand award category winner earning him the title of Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of 1987. The judges of the competition said of him, “ a helluva storyteller. His stories are what travel writing ought to be, educational but interesting, giving a vicarious thrill. The reader gets the feeling that O’Sullivan actually enjoys traveling. Best of all, he makes us believe he’s as unsophisticated a traveler as we are and that if he can survive, so can we.”

The awards will be presented in Washington, D.C., on May 24 during National Tourism Week.