Gill, Westoll among Charles Taylor Prize nominees

Just as a pair of novels came to dominate the past fall’s literary awards season, so too has a pair of non-fiction titles, about tree-planting in the Pacific Northwest and a group of chimps living out their days in a Quebec animal sanctuary, emerged as the books to beat.

Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (Greystone Books) by Charlotte Gill  and The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery (HarperCollins Canada) by Andrew Westoll (both of which were named Q&Q books of the year for 2011) led the nominations for the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, the shortlist for which was announced in Toronto Tuesday morning. Both titles are also on the shortlist for the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction, which was unveiled last month.

The complete shortlist, as chosen by jurors Allan M. Brandt, Stevie Cameron, and Susan Renouf, is as follows:

• Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis (Knopf Canada)
• Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill (Greystone Books)
• The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit by J.J. Lee (McClelland & Stewart)
• Afflictions and Departures by Madeline Sonik (Anvil Press)
• The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery by Andrew Westoll (HarperCollins Canada)

The winner of the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize will be announced at a gala luncheon in Toronto on March 5.

Charles Taylor Prize reveals first ever longlist

Since it was launched in 2000, the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction has traditionally been among the first major literary prizes celebrated in the new year.

Now, for the first time, organizers have revealed a longlist of titles under consideration, citing both “the large number of publishers’ submissions that are received each year” and “the opportunity to promote the best of these books in the all-important Christmas bookselling season.”

Selected from 115 submissions by a jury comprising Allan M. Brandt, Stevie Cameron, and Susan Renouf, the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize longlist is as follows:

• Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter by Carmen Aguirre (Douglas & McIntyre)

• Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis (Knopf Canada)

• The Patrol: Seven Days in the Life of a Canadian Soldier in Afghanistan by Ryan Flavelle (HarperCollins Canada)

• Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill (Greystone Books)

• Nation Maker: Sir John A. MacDonald: His Life, Our Times Volume Two: 1867–1891 by Richard Gwyn (Random House Canada)

• The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit by J. J. Lee (McClelland & Stewart)

• Facing the Hunter: Reflections on a Misunderstood Way of Life by David Adams Richards (Doubleday Canada)

• Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live by Ray Robertson (Biblioasis)

• Afflictions and Departures by Madeline Sonik (Anvil Press)

• The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery by Andrew Westoll (HarperCollins Canada)

• Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism by Joel Yanofsky (Viking Canada)

For those keeping count, D&M Publishers, Random House of Canada, and HarperCollins Canada all have multiple nominations. Six of the 11 longlisted titles also appeared on the longlist for the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction, which announced its shortlist last week.

The Charles Taylor Prize shortlist will be revealed Jan. 10, with the winner, who receives $25,000, being announced March 5.

Richler bio wins Charles Taylor Prize

Charles Foran was awarded this year’s $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction for his biography Mordecai: The Life and Times (Knopf Canada) at a lunchtime ceremony in Toronto today. He beat out Stevie Cameron for On the Farm, Ross King for Defiant Spirits, George Sipos for The Geography of Arrival, and Merrily Weisbord for The Love Queen of Malabar. Each of the runner-up authors will take home $2,000.

Q&Q Omni will have a full story on the award and the ceremony later today.

Read Q&Q‘s review of Mordecai from our Nov. 2010 issue.

Charles Taylor Prize announces nominees

The nominees for the tenth Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction were announced in Toronto this morning. The five-title shortlist was selected from 153 submissions by jurors Neil Bissoondath, Eva-Marie Kröller, and David Macfarlane, who comprised the award’s inaugural jury in 2000. The nominees are:

• On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women by Stevie Cameron (Knopf Canada)
• Mordecai: The Life and Times by Charles Foran (Knopf Canada)
• Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven by Ross King (Douglas & McIntyre/McMichael Canadian Art Collection)
• The Geography of Arrival by George Sipos (Gasperau Press)
• The Love Queen of Malabar by Merrily Weisbord (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

The Charles Taylor Prize, which will be awarded on Feb. 14, isn’t the only major non-fiction prize being handed out this spring. The winner of the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction will be announced on Jan. 30, and the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing will be handed out in Ottawa on Feb. 16.

Daily book biz round-up: gay YA; Gaiman YA; and more

Quiet out there today:

• Charles Taylor Prize taps original jurors for 10th anniversary
• Department of unfortunate word choices: “Jewish people don’t own the Holocaust” – Yann Martel
• The growing popularity of gay-themed YA
• Neil Gaiman wins Carnegie Medal
• Lee Siegel says that fiction has become “culturally irrelevant.” Discuss.

Charles Taylor Prize nominees in the 11th hour

To kick off the event, Ben McNally introduced prize trustee Noreen Taylor, who established the prize to honour her late husband. “I’m going to try not to get really teary-eyed here, but this prize means a lot to me,” McNally said during the event. “When I split from my former employer – who will remain nameless – the Taylor Prize stood by me, and that really means a lot. The relationship I have with the trustees, and most specifically Noreen Taylor, are relationships that I cherish deeply. Charles Taylor himself was a customer of mine and I can think of no more fitting memorial to his extraordinary life than this prize and all that it stands for.” (Photos by Laura Godfrey)

Charles Taylor Prize nominees discuss the writing process

On Friday night, Bravo! hosted the four Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction nominees at the Masonic Temple (also known as MTV studios) in Toronto. Here’s what each of the authors had to say about their books:

Daniel Poliquin, René Lévesque: “I had just been nominated for the Giller Prize two years ago, and I felt unemployed, because all the hoopla was over and now I had this new challenge to work on a new book from scratch, and it was simply exhilarating. I had to first write it in French, and then I thought I would translate myself, but I found that too boring. So I said, I’m going to write it in English, and that’s what I did. So I’ve become, in the process, a bilingual writer – although the editors at Penguin will tell you I have a huge problem with prepositions.”

Kenneth Whyte, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst: “Hearst has been completely overwritten, over-analyzed, and psychoanalyzed. A couple of the biographers actually hired psychoanalysts to help them with the character. I wanted to get to him fresh, and I wanted to get to him through his work. He spent his life working hard, and I thought that would be the most effective way to get at who he was. So I spent a lot of time with his newspapers, the stuff he actually produced on a day-to-day basis.”

Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son: “The book is really an attempt to come to terms with what [my son, Walker] has, our search to find out what it was, how to deal with it, how to keep him alive. But more importantly, what his life was worth. It’s such a difficult life, for him especially, but also for everybody around him, and we tried to figure out what the value of his life was, what his inner life was like, whether I could somehow find his voice.”

John English, Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968–2000: “We’re all biographers, and I think we’re all asking the same question: what was the inner life of this individual? In the case of Pierre Trudeau, he so deliberately seemed to try to conceal it. He had such an obsession with privacy, as anyone who reported on him at the time will know. And yet, what was curious for me was that he kept these papers that were so revealing, in terms of his own past, his feelings, his passions.”

The full discussion will be aired on Bravo!’s Arts & Minds on Jan. 30 at 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. and on Jan. 31 at 7 p.m. The award itself, which comes with a $25,000 prize, will be given out on Feb. 8.

At the altar of The Shark God

The Last Heathen, Charles Montgomery’s non-fiction South Pacific saga about missionaries, murder, and more, is starting to make waves internationally. It was published here in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre two years ago and won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, and last month HarperCollins issued it in the U.S. and the U.K. as The Shark God (which, frankly, strikes Quillblog as a much punchier and more intriguing title).

Montgomery’s book has been scoring appreciative reviews. The Guardian calls it a “remarkable debut … a travel story as dark and twisted as one might ever wish to hear.” And a B+ Entertainment Weekly notice says the book “offers a heady blend of history, memoir, and anthropology.” The New York Times is appreciative, too: reviewer Holly Morris says “Montgomery is a thoughtful and entertaining guide, and his story has rich layers of history and anthropology.” Morris does have one criticism, though — she wished for more “introspection” and found the book too “outward-looking.” Now that’s a complaint you don’t hear every day.

(Thanks to Bookslut.com for a couple of the links.)

Related links:
Click here for the New York Times review
Click here for the Guardian review
Click here for the Entertainment Weekly review