Explore the shortlist for this year's Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for non-fiction on CBC Books! You can find video and audio clips of excerpts and author interviews in the links below. Here are the finalists:
Charles Foran | Mordecai: The Life & Times Published by Knopf Canada
From the publisher:
"
Foran's book is IT: the definitive, detailed, intimate portrait of Mordecai Richler, the lion of Canadian literature, and the turbulent, changing times that nurtured him. It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century."
Charlotte Gill | Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe
Published by Greystone Books/David Suzuki Foundation
From the publisher:
"
Charlotte Gill spent twenty years working as a tree planter in the forests of Canada. During her million-tree career, she encountered hundreds of clearcuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites."
From the publisher:
"In this hilarious and captivating book, CBC personality Grant Lawrence adds a whole new chapter to the saga of this storied piece of BC coastline."
Ray Robertson | Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live
Published by Biblioasis
From the publisher:
"
With the vitality of Nick Hornby and a brashness all his own, Robertson runs his hands over life, death, intoxication, and art. Unashamedly working-class and unabashedly literary, Why Not? is a rolling, rocking, anti-Sisyphean odyssey. "
Richard Gwyn | Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times; Volume Two: 1867-1891
Grant Lawrence | Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nudist Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound 