TORONTO — Books about tree planting, autism and chimpanzees are competing for both the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize and the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
The nominees for the B.C. Award were announced last week, while the Taylor long list was released Monday.
Charlotte Gill is up for Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe; Joel Yanofsky is in the running for Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism;” and Andrew Westoll is a contender for The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery.”
This year is the first time the Charles Taylor Prize has released a long list. Eleven titles were selected from 115 submissions and a final short list of contenders will be announced on Jan. 10.
The winner will be crowned on March 5.
The other longlisted books are: Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter by Carmen Aguirre; Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis; The Patrol: Seven Days in the Life of a Canadian Soldier in Afghanistan by Ryan Flavelle; Nation Maker: Sir John A. MacDonald: His Life, Our Times Volume Two: 1867 — 1891 by Richard Gwyn; The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit by J. J. Lee; Facing the Hunter: Reflections on a Misunderstood Way of Life by David Adams Richards; Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live by Ray Robertson; Afflictions and Departures: Essays by Madeline Sonik.
Gill and Gwyn were also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. That prize was won by Charles Foran’s Mordecai: The Life & Times.” Foran’s book also won last year’s Charles Taylor prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.