A memoir of growing up on the Prairies — and a pair of lucky shoes — has earned award-winning author Rudy Wiebe the 2007 Charles Taylor Prize.

Wiebe, 72, accepted the $25,000 prize for Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest at a luncheon ceremony in Toronto.

Noreen Taylor, founder of the Charles Taylor Prize for Non Fiction, with 2007 winner Rudy Wiebe.
(Tom Sandler/Charles Taylor Prize)

Wiebe's work outpolled John English's Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume One: 1919-1968; and Ross King's The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism. Each of the finalists was presented a leather-bound copy of his book.

A three-member jury praised Wiebe's "spare and eloquent" prose and called Of This Earth an "evocative and moving memoir of his childhood in rural Saskatchewan" in which he "finds universal truths amidst an isolated, little-known community."

"I have to confess something: I had an unfair advantage," the Saskatchewan-born Wiebe said while accepting the annual literary non-fiction honour.

"The shoes I am wearing I bought in 1974 to go to Rideau Hall to receive the Governor General's Award … for The Temptations of Big Bear," the veteran novelist, short story writer and essayist said about his "lucky shoes" to laughter from the audience.

On a more serious note, Wiebe paid tribute to his wife and also to his immigrant parents who built a life in the isolated, mostly Mennonite community of Speedwell, Sask.

"My mother would have said: 'What do you want with such a book; who will read it? This unimportant family struggling in the bush — there's nothing particular about them,'" he said.

"Well, I can say to my mother now … this is what life in Canada is like."

Memoir reflects lives of many Canadians: Wiebe

Following the ceremony, Wiebe told CBC Arts Online that his memoir is a Canadian story that is representative of the lives of the many who venture to Canada to make a new life.

"Many Canadians have experiences exactly as this. Their parents, they came here as refugees or immigrants from somewhere else looking for better land, a better place to raise their families," he said.

"More and more Canadians are like that. They're telling these stories in marvelous ways."

Wiebe, who was partially inspired to write his memoir as a way to share stories about his childhood with his grandchildren, largely relied on his own memories of his early years in Speedwell — which is now a cattle pasture where nobody lives, he said.

"I wanted it basically to be my own memory and not a combination of what we all though happened. Everybody's experience of particular event is different," he explained.

Photographs played vital role

A selection of family and community photos he gathered went a long way in jogging the writer's memories.

"Out of the photographs, you see things that you'd forgotten. And from those little details that are in the pictures, memories are triggered and verified and sometimes you write your story basically out of the picture," he said.

Each year, organizers of the Charles Taylor Prize recognize a Canadian writer who has written a book that "demonstrates a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style and a subtlety of thought and perception."

Established in memory of Canadian essayist, author and former Globe and Mail correspondent Charles Taylor, who died in 1997, the prize was originally awarded every other year. In 2004, the prize became an annual honour.