When the last Thomas Cook Travel Book Award was presented in 2004, it seemed that prizes for serious travel writing were gone for good.

But the news, this year, that the Dolman Best Travel Book Award – which was created in 2006 for first-time writers – would now be open to all means there is a worthy successor.

This year’s shortlist for the £1,000 prize shows just how strong and varied travel writing can be. Ironically, all the entries happen to be first-time travel books.

Tim Butcher took time off from his post as The Daily Telegraph’s Africa correspondent to make a journey along the Congo and write Blood River (Vintage £7.99).

The book provides a glimpse of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a mineral-rich country that was once wealthy and safe (Butcher’s mother travelled downriver without incident as a young woman), but is now a byword for calamity: for most of the journey, Butcher is guarded by missionaries or NGOs, and he is eventually forced to abort the journey.

Blood River is having a charmed life with awards: having become the first travel book to be shortlisted by Richard & Judy, it has also made it into the last six for the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize.

In his summing up, the chair of the Dolman judges, Michael Jacobs, mentioned excluding one of my favourite travel books of last year, Roger Deakin’s Wildwood (Penguin £8.99), for not being enough about travel. I disagree: Deakin travels in Britain, through the wild walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere in his obsession with trees.

At least Robert Macfarlane, Deakin’s friend, did make it onto the list. Having shown his talent with his first book, the award-winning Mountains of the Mind, Macfarlane devotes his initial foray into travel, The Wild Places (Granta £8.99), to creating a verbal map of Britain’s surviving remotenesses.

He writes with great beauty and originality, but his stories are somehow dislocated, his voice slightly remote, his book lacking the clarity, cohesion and depth of Deakin’s.

Christopher Robbins also knows about wild places, having travelled extensively In Search of Kazakhstan (Profile £7.99). Subtitled The Land That Disappeared, his book gives us a portrait of a country about which most of us know nothing.

Robbins would have had a success on his hands merely as a foil to Borat, but he got lucky when the president, known for dismantling the country’s nuclear weapons and clamping down on Islamist groups, invited him on a tour of the oil-rich state.

Nonetheless, the book comes across as a slight work; and it is puzzling to see it on the shortlist in the place of the human-rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (Profile £7.99), an account of the loss of that most simple of pleasures, the ability to walk in the countryside. Winner of an Orwell prize, it is a book that shows how relevant and powerful travel writing can be.

Henry Hemming’s Misadventure in the Middle East (Nicholas Brealey £10.99) takes us to Iran, Iraq, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The madness of his venture – driving around the region with a friend – and the freshness of his picaresque writing about this well-trodden part of the world makes it compulsively readable. The fact that few of us will be heading to Iraq in the foreseeable future makes it all the more relevant.

In this exotic company, a poet’s memoir of Athens seemed the least likely of winners, but John Lucas’s 92 Achar-non Street (Eland £12.99), a wonderful, idiosyncratic view of modern Greece, carried off the 2008 Dolman. The poet strings together several years’ worth of experiences from the 1980s, when he was posted to Athens as visiting Lord Byron professor of English. Sharply observed, passionate and delightfully rambling, it reeks of a love of life, letters and all things Greek. Butcher’s and Hemming’s tales are more daring, Macfarlane’s is more beautifully written and Robbins’s Kazakh book is more unusual, but in the absence of Shehadeh, Lucas’s slice of Greek life is an unexpected, rewarding winner – an entertaining companion wherever you are heading this summer.

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