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.

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.

Montreal petitioned to honour Mordecai Richler

On Monday, Montreal city councillor Marvin Rotrand tabled a petition consisting of more than 2,500 signatures calling for a public space to be renamed after Mordecai Richler by July 3, a date marking the 10th anniversary of the author’s death. The CBC has more:

So far, some suggestions have ruffled feathers, including renaming a street such as Mile End’s Fairmount Street or Saint-Urbain Street after the author.

However, Rotrand said one idea is gaining momentum.

“The number one thing is to name a library for Mordecai Richler. A lot of people suggested the Mile End Library,” said Rotrand, noting the library in the heart of the neighbourhood where Richler grew up and set many of his novels, including Barney’s Version. …

“The fact that a writer of the stature of Mordecai Richler doesn’t in his own home town have some sort of recognition seems odd to me,” said Rotrand.

Books of the Year 2010: Non-fiction

There’s no formula for choosing the books of the year. Some break ground, some tackle familiar themes with new energy. Some represent the best work from established authors, some introduce us to important new voices. And some are simply in-house favourites we feel deserve a little more attention. Here are the non-fiction books that made the most impact in 2010. (more…)

Daily book biz round-up: Amazon’s best books of 2010; Bush memoir bores; and more

Today’s book news:

• Amazon announces the best books of 2010
• Despite tantalizing embargo, Bush memoir yields little of interest
• Mordecai Richler’s widow takes in film adaptation of Barney’s Version
• Sales down at Harlequin
• Stop the madness! Author plans to write 24 three-day novels in a year
• We missed this last week: Leanne Shapton’s Native Trees of Canada sketchbook

McGill launches Richler residency with pub crawl

McGill University is launching its Mordecai Richler writer-in-residence program this September.  The 2010-11 writers in residence have yet to be announced, but both will teach one course per year, and act as an adviser to aspiring writers. The program also provides bursaries and awards to emerging writers on campus. McGill is celebrating the launch by hosting a pub crawl in several of Richler’s favourite watering holes.

From the Gazette:

That’s some sort of poetic justice, too, since Richler used to delight in taking snipes at McGill, which he had accused of being “stuffy” and of having restrictive enrolment practices back in the day when he was of university-entering age.

But all has been forgiven and forgotten, particularly after Richler was presented with an honorary doctorate from McGill a few months before he passed away in 2001.

McGill has already raised $750,000 -including $100,000 from Richler’s widow, Florence – for this $2.5-million program.

Mavis wasn’t crazy about Mordecai

Here’s an excerpt from the interview Jhumpa Lahiri did with Mavis Gallant in the new issue of Granta. (We just thought it was funny…)

MG: I remember one of the people around in that winter of 1950-51, and who I moved to the Right Bank to get away from, was Mordecai Richler. He was a bit of a brat. He was much younger. I’d met him in Montreal.

[...]

That winter everyone in the world was around Paris that I knew, practically. And I realized he didn’t like it at all. For one thing, he couldn’t speak any French. Though he came from Montreal, he couldn’t say, “Pass the salt.” He couldn’t say anything.

[...]

One day Mordecai came drifting over and he sat down and he grabbed the book out of my hand that I was reading. It was The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen’s great novel.

[...]

And he read some in a mocking voice. A mocking English voice that he didn’t do very well. And he said, “You know, if you go on reading this crap you’re never going to get anywhere.” So I just took the book back.

Giamatti’s version

Richard Dreyfuss played Duddy, James Woods was Joshua (from the novel Joshua Then and Now), and now actor Paul Giamatti – best known for his starring roles in Sideways and American Splendor – is set to play Barney Panofsky, the curmudgeonly protagonist of Mordecai Richler’s 1997 Giller Prize-winning novel Barney’s Version. Reportedly, the $28-million production will hit theatres sometime in 2010. From The Globe and Mail:

After years of rewrites, Toronto producer Robert Lantos has finally green lit the script for a big screen adaptation of the late Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version, and has signed Emmy-winner Paul Giamatti to play the lead.

The multimillion-dollar production, written by Michael Konyves and directed by Richard J. Lewis, is slated to begin shooting this summer in Montreal, New York and Rome.

Banned books

It’s the American Library Association‘s Banned Books Week, and their website features lists of frequently challenged books covering various eras on their website. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is 37th on the ALA’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s.

In honour of Banned Books Week, the Guardian asks whether or not you’ve been exercising your freedom to read, with a quiz about censored books past and present. Here’s one to ponder:

Who was the ALA’s most frequently “challenged” author of 2007?

1. Mark Twain
2. Richard Dawkins
3. Maya Angelou
4. Robert Cormier

Here is a look at some books that have been challenged in Canada, and some of the reasons why. The list includes a number of Canadian authors, including Deborah Ellis, Alice Munro, and Mordecai Richler. And, going local, the Fahrenheit 451 blog for the Pelham Public Library in Fonthill, ON, discusses censorship issues and provides lists of books that have been banned at the library challenged in various locations, including schools and libraries, over the past few years.

Canada Reads, Day 1: nobody voted off yet

After the first day of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads program, all five books – Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis, Children of My Heart by Gabrielle Roy, Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor, The Song of Kahunsha by Anosh Irani, and Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill – remain in contention. Host Bill Richardson decided to let the debate go on another day before asking that the panelists – Steven Page, Denise Bombardier, Jim Cuddy, Donna Morrissey, and John K. Samson – vote the first title out.

This year, Richardson will be writing a running “colour commentary” in the form of a blog. (Read it here.) The first entry was actually written the night before the debates, and is mostly about Richardson’s state of mind only hours before they were to begin. Some of Richardson’s digressions fall under the heading of Too Much Information: “I am writing this in bed, propped up on several over-stuffed pillows, my laptop atop my lap, broadcasting mercy knows what deleterious waves in the direction of my generative organs (fat lot of good they’ve done me, anyway).” But he does make one, perhaps unintentionally revealing comment about this year’s list of books.

[Novels by Mordecai Richler have] twice been shot down in the early rounds of the game. Humour or satire has never fared well in Canada Reads, a lesson this year’s All Stars must have taken to heart. None of this year’s titles is, first and foremost, funny.

At least not “deleterious waves in the direction of my generative organs” funny, anyway.