FINALISTS NAMED FOR CANADA'S LARGEST NON-FICTION AWARD
VANCOUVER, Dec. 8 /CNW/ - The 2011 shortlist for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction was announced today by Premier Gordon Campbell and Keith Mitchell, chair of the BC Achievement Foundation. The BC Award is the richest non-fiction book prize in the country and the non-fiction counterpart to the Giller Prize for fiction and the Griffin Poetry Prize.
The finalists for the $40,000 prize are Stevie Cameron for "On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver's Missing Women," James FitzGerald for "What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son's Quest to Redeem the Past," Charles Foran for "Mordecai: The Life & Times," and John Vaillant for "The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival."
"The finalists for this year's award demonstrate the talent and diversity of non-fiction writing in Canada today," said Premier Campbell, a director of the BC Achievement Foundation. "This award is British Columbia's opportunity to highlight the important contribution Canada's best non-fiction writers make to our nation's culture and discourse."
"We thank the jury members for their painstaking effort and time as they read the 151 submitted books, narrowed the submissions to a list of 10, and decided upon this excellent shortlist," said Mitchell.
The shortlist was chosen by jury members Alma Lee, founder of the Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival and Writers' Union of Canada; Philip Marchand, author, book columnist, and magazine writer; and Noah Richler, award-winning author and broadcaster. Ms. Lee and Mr. Marchand will select the winner that will be announced January 31, 2011 at a special presentation ceremony in Vancouver.
The finalists are described in the following citations from the jury:
Stevie Cameron
On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver's Missing Women
The story of Robert William Pickton and his chilling slaughter of scores of "missing" Vancouver women went unnoticed for so long that it became, beyond a gruesome murder case and the longest and most expensive criminal investigation ever conducted in Canada, a trial that put police authorities on trial for their seeming disinterest in the city's less fortunate.
In On the Farm, Stevie Cameron, one of the best investigative journalists in the country, has applied her keen mind and scrutiny to the Pickton case and fashioned a masterly narrative that brings not only the lives of the victims and sleuthing of investigators to the fore, but also the perpetrator's upbringing—a strange, Deliverance-like childhood that seems of another world. Indeed, there are all sorts of ways in which, without this book, Canadians might have been able to relegate this terrible and upsetting story to another world—and leave it there, rendering the women "missing" a second time. Cameron's book has prevented this.
James FitzGerald
What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son's Quest to Redeem the Past
The emotional chilliness of early twentieth century Toronto is blended with a tragic story of brilliant scientists and physicians doomed to madness, in journalist James FitzGerald's memoir, What Disturbs Our Blood. In this quest, rendered with poetic intensity of feeling, FitzGerald investigates the suicide of his grandfather, a titan of public health in the history of Toronto, and its effect on his father, another distinguished medical man, and on the author himself. Never maudlin or melodramatic, FitzGerald's book is a masterpiece of its genre, the chronicle of family secrets unearthed and healing attained.
Charles Foran
Mordecai: The Life & Times
In the preface to his superb biography, Mordecai: The Life and Times, Charles Foran writes, "Lucky the biographer presented with such complexity in his subject. Luckier still if that character reveals itself with equal force in the work and in the life." Foran indeed is lucky, but the shade of Mordecai Richler, it turns out, is equally happy to have a biographer who knows what to do with his good fortune. Literary journalist and fiction writer Charles Foran has written a lucid, eloquent, judicious book on one of Canada's greatest novelists. It is thoroughly researched, but Foran never allows detail to overwhelm his memorable narrative.
John Vaillant
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
The Tiger by John Vaillant is a story that takes place in an ancient and remote part of the world - the Primorye Territory in Russia's Far East. This isolated place is close to the Chinese border and is home to the Arum tiger. There are many human players in this tale but the tiger—especially one that is out for vengeance —is the focus. This is a chilling adventure and Vaillant's description of the locale and the people who live there brings them to life; a life of dire poverty created when logging was closed down in the region. This is a page-turner that in the end brings us to understand the tiger, probably the most intelligent super-predator in the world. Superbly written and highly enlightening, this is a gripping story about man in conflict with nature.
The BC National Award is an annual national prize established by the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, an independent foundation endowed by the Province of British Columbia in 2003 to celebrate excellence in the arts, humanities, enterprise, and community service.
For more information on the award and this year's finalists, please call 604 261-9777 or visit www.bcachievement.com. Downloadable images of book covers and authors' photos for this year's shortlist are also available at this URL.
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