Hungry for some great nonfiction reads? We're celebrating this year's Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction with our Cook Up a Literary Feast contest. Submit your own personalized menu of nonfiction treats for a chance to win great prizes, including President's Choice gift cards and a tablet computer.

As we head towards the gala on October 21, we'll be featuring entries from the jurors and shortlisted authors. Here we have CBC's Evan Solomon with his nonfiction reading menu. He loves a good literary feast so much he picked two main courses!

APPETIZER:

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed by John Vaillant

MAIN COURSE:

Both Sir John A: The Man who Made Us and Nation Maker: Sir John A Macdonald, His Life, Our Times by Richard Gwyn

DESSERT:

Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae by Ken McGoogan

CHEF'S NOTE:

The theme of my literary feast is "An Adventure in Canadian Taste," exploring the natural and political wilds of Canada. Each book has a unique individual at the core, but each represents a different side of our country, the brashness, the struggle, the clash of humanity and nature, the battles of different people to work together and learn from each other. It is a feast meant to reflect our country.

The Golden Spruce, an epic tragic book, takes place in the Canadian Eden that is Haida Gwaii and tells of the arrival of a serpent. The book stimulates the desire for more reading and more stories about our great country, so, like a good first course, we begin here.

Richard Gwyn's epic two-part biography of Sir John A. Macdonald is the main course. These are masterful biographies, richly spiced with the complexities of our first Prime Minister and the country he helped build, marinated in a lovely alcohol-based sauce that brings out a profound, lasting flavour of the man and the country. It is the main course to be consumed slowly, enjoying every bite.

Fatal Passage is my dessert pick. Some might say dessert should be sweet and light, but this book is more substantial, almost like the drink after the meal is done. This book reveals so much about the discovery of the north of our country, and the politics of adventure, and the meeting of cultures. From the first page it carries you on a journey and leaves you, at the end, fully satiated and satisfied, like a good meal. (Of course, the tragedy is that the Franklin men starved to death, and turned to cannibalism, but please don't let that upset your literary appetite.) I have used this book to help in my own expedition to search for Franklin, but long before we set foot on King William Island in the North West Passage, this book had already taken me there. It leaves a lasting taste in your mouth.