The Independent on Sunday has once again joined forces with Bradt Travel Guides (bradtguides.com) to offer readers the chance to win our travel-writing competition, with a top prize this year of a holiday for two to Abruzzo in Italy and publication of the winning entry in the travel section of the paper.

To boldy go where no man has gone before (possibly)

The collection

The author Louis de Bernières tells Emily Jupp about the pain of a crumbling relationship and the threat of losing his children

"My father's murder severed my personal links with Nigeria," writes Noo Saro-Wiwa in the prologue of her travelogue. Looking for Transwonderland is set in Nigeria, a country that venerated her father, Ken, for his 1980s TV comedy series, Basi & Company, and then executed him less than a decade later for his politics: a campaign against Shell's despoliation of the oil-rich delta. "In the ten years after my father's death, I returned only twice for very brief visits to attend his official funeral in 2000, and his actual burial in 2005."

The Guidebook

Insight Guides' Select series has four new editions: Marrakech, Paris, Chicago and Shanghai, all bound in patterned linen. £9.99 each.

Go to Insightguides.com

From Spanish airport strikes to naked German spas, Steve Anderson runs down the most popular articles published in 2011, as well as a few editors' favourites

This makes for a very pleasant hour: lullabies are the most universal of art forms, and the wishes expressed by these mothers are both multifarious and significant.

Whether it's Britain's bays, stunning Sweden or the magical Med, Enjoli Liston selects the top spots by the sea

Lonely Planets and Rough Guides are always pretty handy, but to really capture the romance of roaming, seek out these travelogues...

"Ahh, I long to have flowerbeds neatly mulched like this," says my godmother, covetously, eyeing up the azaleas. We are at Wakehurst Place in Haywards Heath, Sussex, admiring the neatly kept gardens, now all kitted out for summer. We've wandered through the bluebell woods, admired the long views to distant birch plantations, and done the sums on a June wedding hosted in the Elizabethan mansion. And it's not even lunchtime.

Simon Nixon, the entrepreneur behind Moneysupermarket.com, has walked away from his online travel venture after two years saying the business model was "simply not viable".