Author and journalist Charles Foran has won the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction for his biography of Canadian literary lion Mordecai Richler.
The win of one of Canada’s top non-fiction prizes brings Richler’s name back into the spotlight again following the release of the film Barney’s Version, based on a Richler novel. Paul Giamatti, who plays Barney, recently won a Golden Globe award for his performance.
Accepting the award at a ceremony in Toronto yesterday, Foran toasted Richler and said, “People have been too kind to say the obvious for the last four and a half years and that is that I have been standing on the shoulders of a giant in writing this book.”
Foran expressed deep gratitude to Richler’s widow, Florence Richler, for her help with the book. When he wanted to write the book, he said, “I went up to Montreal and met her and we spent the afternoon together, and in the end she said I’ll speak with you and that opened every door. I was eternally grateful to Florence because she made this book not once, not twice but three times as good as it would have been otherwise.”
Foran also praised and thanked his editor Louise Dennys, executive director of the Knopf Random House Group in Canada, “who very generously and patiently cut down a book that would have been around 1,000 pages had it run in its original form.” The final was almost 800 pages.
The jurors, author Neil Bissoondath, academic Eva-Marie Kroller and author David MacFarlane chose Foran’s biography from 153 other submissions. The other finalists were journalist Stevie Cameron for On the Farm: Robert Williams Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouvers’s Missing Women (Alfred A. Knopf Canada); Ross King’s Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven (Douglas & McIntyre); The Geography of Arrival: A Memoir by George Sipos (Gaspereau Press), and The Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das.
