Britain’s leading non-fiction book award has been won by a Canadian.

Wade Davis has won the  $32,000 Samuel Johnson Prize – for his gripping account of a doomed attempt to climb Mount Everest.

“Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest” tells the story of British mountaineer George Mallory – the   man who famously declared he wanted to climb Everest “because it is there.”

Mallory died on the world’s highest peak in 1924, and debate still rages about whether he reached the summit.

Davis sets the expedition in the context of Britain’s imperial history and the trauma of the First World War.