Charles Foran is the first author to win Canada’s newest and largest prize for nonfiction. His biography of one of Canada’s most famous writers, Mordecai Richler, won the C$60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, which was presented at a ceremony in Toronto last night.
The Writers’ Trust of Canada previously had a C$25,000 nonfiction prize, but the trust asked Weston to sponsor the award, and she told the crowd gathered in a concert hall for the ceremony that she was “easily persuaded.” Her patronage increased the prize to C$60,000 with an additional C$5,000 going to each of the four other finalists. The trust hopes the new large prize will help raise the profile of nonfiction writing in Canada and give the kind of boost to book sales that the Scotiabank Giller Prize gives to fiction in Canada.
Weston, served as the lieutenant governor of the province of Ontario, who represents the Queen in Ontario, from 1997 to 2002. She is also married to billionaire grocery magnate Galen Weston.
It is the second big win for Mordecai: The Life & Times (published by Knopf Canada), which also won the C$25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction earlier this year.
Accepting the award, Foran pointed to the irony that the writing of a biography of “an alpha male” was dependent on the contributions of three extraordinary women – Louise Dennys, executive publisher of the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group, Mordecai Richler’s wife Richler, who “was an extraordinary aid, scolder, and who provided insight and wisdom from the very beginning,” and his own wife Mary Ladky.
The jury members were authors Brian Brett, Devyani Saltzman and Russell Wangersky. The other four finalists were: Charlotte Gill for Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (Greystone Books/David Suzuki Foundation); 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).
