The shortlist for the annual RBC Taylor Prize, recognizing the best in Canadian literary non-fiction, was announced this morning at a press conference in Toronto. The finalists include several high-profile authors, including journalist Ian Brown, who won the prize six years ago for The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son (Random House Canada), and biographer Rosemary Sullivan, who won the 2015 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction for her Taylor nominated title, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (HarperCollins Canada).
Selected by jurors Susanne Boyce, Joseph Kertes, and Stephen J. Toope from a 12-title longlist, the finalists are as follows:
- Ian Brown, Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year (Random House Canada)
- Camilla Gibb, This is Happy (Doubleday Canada)
- David Halton, Dispatches from the Front: The Life of Matthew Halton, Canada’s Voice at War (Penguin Random House Canada)
- Wab Kinew, The Reason You Walk (Viking Canada)
- Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (HarperCollins)
Each finalist receives $2,000. The winner of the $25,000 purse will be announced at a luncheon on March 7 at Toronto’s Omni King Edward Hotel.