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Slideshow: Charles Foran takes home inaugural Hilary Weston Prize

A biography of iconic Montreal novelist and journalist Mordecai Richler was named the inaugural winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction. Charles Foran was awarded the $60,000 prize on Tuesday for Mordecai: The Life & Times (Knopf Canada).

Foran’s ambitious 700-page portrait of Richler also won this year’s $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, and was a finalist for the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction. It is also nominated for the 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction, the winner of which will be announced Nov. 15.

In accepting the award at a gala at Toronto’s Koerner Hall, Foran said he was “delighted, humbled, honoured, and greatly pleasured.”

Foran thanked award sponsor Hilary Weston for her support of Canadian literature and singled out Charles Taylor Prize founder Noreen Taylor. He also acknowledged the “three extraordinary women” who enabled his biography of a man he described as an alpha male: Louise Dennys, Foran’s editor at Knopf Canada; Richler’s widow Florence, a “provider of insight and wisdom”; and Foran’s wife, Mary.

The prize jury was comprised of writers Brian Brett, Devyani Saltzman, and Russell Wangersky. In their citation, the jury praised Foran’s biography as “an epic work of scholarship and energy” that portrays Richler’s nature “with a disarming equilibrium.”

Foran is an accomplished novelist and essayist, but Mordecai is his first biography (he has since written a short biography of Maurice Richard, published in March, for Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series).

“I was a neophyte. I was a newcomer to this pretty complex form,” he says, adding that he suspects his novelist’s instincts gave the book narrative flow and fleshed-out characters.

Foran told Q&Q he regrets that Richler’s novels, which were taught in high schools across the country 25 years ago, are no longer nearly as popular in the curriculum. He hopes his Weston Prize win might help change that. “I would like him to be taught again,” says Foran. “I still think [Richler’s] voice, that sort of outsider voice – satiric, abrasive, not sweet, not about nature, not about memory … this large, slightly intimidating voice is important. To have him back on the curriculum would be to remind young Canadians that we have a lot of different voices in this country.”

For her part, Weston emphasized the prize’s mandate to “promote factual writing to young readers” by distributing an educational supplement to Canadian schools.

The four other Weston Prize finalists are Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (Greystone Books); Richard Gwyn’s Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times; Volume Two: 1867–1891 (Random House Canada); Grant Lawrence’s Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound (Harbour Publishing); and Ray Robertson’s Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live (Biblioasis). Each finalist received $5,000.

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