Presenting Charles Taylor prize nominee Ross King

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Friday, February 1, 2013 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, which recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing, will award $25,000 to the winning author on March 4. Join Maclean’s and the five finalists Feb. 27 for a panel discussion at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. 

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

Ross King, 50, may have a Ph.D. in English literature, a couple of novels and six critically acclaimed books on art history to his credit, including Leonardo and the Last Supper, nominated for the Charles Taylor prize. But as a boy growing up in Saskatchewan, what King really wanted to be was a political cartoonist. A certain Prairie realism—“I had no ability to draw or paint,” he says—sent him to university for 14 years. Next, unable to find an academic job, he tried his hand at historical novels. They did “well enough,” says King, who has lived in Britain since 1992, but he still wanted to write about actual history, particularly art history. “What I took away from novels were the basics of writing them—plot, character, action, atmosphere. I wanted to put all that into books that read like novels except that everything was true.”

King may not be able to draw, but craft well-researched, beautifully written, novel-like illuminations of key moments in the history of Western art? That he can do like few others. Since 2003, three of King’s books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, with two of them winning it, including Leonardo.

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And the winner of the Charles Taylor Prize is…

By Brian Bethune - Monday, March 5, 2012 at 6:03 PM - 0 Comments

Michelle Siu/CP

Click on the links to read excerpts from the five books that were nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize.

Andrew Westoll emerged as the winner of the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction from one of the strongest shortlists the prize has ever assembled. Literary jurors—in this case authors Allan Brandt and Stevie Cameron, and publishing consultant Susan Renouf—always say their choice was excruciatingly difficult, but anyone familiar with all five books could only nod along. Continue…

Excerpt: Afflictions & Departures

By Jessica Allen - Monday, March 5, 2012 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Courtesy of Madeline Sonik

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing, awarding $25,000 to the winning author on March 5.

Madeline Sonik’s fourth book begins with the circumstances surrounding her conception on-board the Queen Mary in 1959; that same year, she writes, American Airlines started its 707 service from New York to L.A., and the U.S.S.R. photographed the far side of the moon. Several of the 17 first-person experimental essays in Afflictions & Departures effortlessly sway between these offbeat historical details that read like curious non-sequiturs and the author’s memories growing up in the chaos of the 60s and 70s. Clearly, even though Sonik digs deep personally, she—and everyone—is part of a much larger picture.

Often with beautiful brevity, the 52-year-old author recalls memories that drip with sweet, youthful innocence; scenes of riding bikes down suburban roads, smoking cigarettes in trees and first kisses play out with cinematic effects. And even though the stories are brutally honest, many anecdotes still manage to elicit laughter: when a 14-year-old Sonik asks some neighbourhood boys why they don’t like her, they explain that she’s not like the other girls. And, “Other girls wouldn’t ask. They’d just go home!”

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Life with the chimps of Fauna Sanctuary

By Marni Jackson - Thursday, March 1, 2012 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Courtesy of HarperCollins

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing, awarding $25,000 to the winning author on March 5.

Andrew Westoll spent a year studying capuchin monkeys in the upper Amazon basin, training as a primatologist, before he decided to become a writer. “When I was in Suriname,” Westoll said, “I decided that I wanted to have a more visceral connection with nature than science could offer.” It doesn’t get more visceral than the experience he had working with chimpanzees at the Fauna Sanctuary in rural Quebec. He spent several months as a volunteer there, caring for 13 apes that had been rescued from a medical research lab by the sanctuary’s founder, Gloria Grow. Some of the chimps had been deeply damaged by their earlier treatment, while others like to accessorize themselves with beads, throw spitballs and play endless games of tag. Slowly, Westoll bonded with the chimps. “I soon realized that this was going to be a book with 13 protagonists.”

“The biggest surprise to me was how emotional and sensitive chimps are,” Westoll says. “We tend to talk about their cognitive abilities, or their social behaviour; we rarely talk about their inner lives, which I would say are almost as complex as humans’.”

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Excerpt: ‘The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit’

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Simon Hayter

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing, awarding $25,000 to the winning author on March 5.

Before JJ Lee, a fashion journalist and amateur tailor, became interested in the minutiae of menswear, it was not uncommon for him to wear an ill-fitting suit, like the masses of guileless young men who wander into malls looking for fast-fix formal wear. In fact, Lee, who studied architecture at university, skipped both his undergraduate and graduate convocations because he had nothing to wear.

The final straw occurred nine years ago when Lee wore an inadequate suit to his father’s funeral. What follows is recounted in The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit, an exquisite book, Lee’s first, that weaves together moments from the author’s life that play parts in his sartorial enlightenment—an education that orbits the literal deconstruction of his father’s last remaining suit. As Lee cuts and unravels this dark navy single-breasted piece with a notch lapel, intending to fit it to himself, he looks for clues to better understand—and to resolve regrets with—his often aloof father: a Chinese immigrant who was married with two kids, and working all hours in Montreal restaurants, by the time he was 19. Both tender and painful moments from Lee’s often cheerless childhood are chronicled side by side with the evolution of the suit—from its rebellious beginnings, when “17th-century Protestant clergy [pined] for the days of long robes and modest tunics that covered a man’s legs,” to its rise via harbingers of style, including Oscar Wilde, the duke of Windsor and Giorgio Armani, and its eventual demise thanks in large part to jeans. Key to Lee learning such things as the origins of the vest, buttonholes and the difference between a made-to-measure suit and the bespoke tailoring of Savile Row is Modernize Tailors, the last of the great Vancouver Chinatown suit-makers, where his apprenticeship begins.

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Introducing The Charles Taylor Prize finalists

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 3:46 PM - 0 Comments

Excerpt: Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Grant Harder

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing, awarding $25,000 to the winning author on March 5.

Before Charlotte Gill, 40, of Powell River, B.C., became a prize-winning short-story author (Ladykiller, 2005) she was a tree planter. A professional tree planter, in fact, and for 17 years—long enough to plant a million seedlings on the West Coast’s windblown mountaintops, mist-shrouded sodden valleys and all the terrain in between. It was a job of constant physical misery and intermittent moments of emotional and intellectual clarity, a job she loved and loathed. And one Gill had to write about, in Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize, to fully grasp the pull it exerted on her and her companions, and still does. “We still think of ourselves as planters,” she says.

In prose that is at once lyrical, nuanced and sharp-edged, Gill examines a trade and a way of life, from the micro (the way even the most barren-seeming of clear-cuts is swarming with tiny life) to the macro (the sheer scale of Canada’s timber industry).

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EXCERPT: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

The New York Times Photo Archives/Redux

Vancouver-born and now resident in Washington as the National Geographic Society’s Explorer-in-Residence, Wade Davis, 58, is one of the most celebrated Canadian scientists and authors of his generation. The ethnobotanist, anthropologist and historian has written 15 books, none closer to his heart than his newest, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize. Davis loves the wild places of the world and has always been fascinated by the social and cultural upheavals wrought by the First World War, still a living memory in his childhood. “Both my grandfathers were in the war, and the headmaster of my school had been at the Somme,” he recalls. “When I was in Nepal I heard the stories of the postwar expeditions—the Englishmen reading Shakespeare to each other in the snow—and I knew by their ages that they too must have been in the war.”

The result is a book Davis calls “the best I’ve ever written,” a beautifully evocative exploration of the inchoate motives of a group of British climbers who attempted to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. There was patriotism, of course, but also a desire for cleansing redemption. That ascending the world’s tallest peak was of no practical use added immensely to its appeal; privation and the very real possibility of death, to men who had survived the trenches, was scarcely worth mentioning.

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Where’s the sizzle in Canada’s non-fiction?

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 5:54 PM - 0 Comments

Noreen Taylor, founder and chair of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, with this year's shortlisted books. (Tom Sandler/CP)

I was at the shortlist announcement for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction this morning. Our regular books writer, Brian Bethune, couldn’t make it, so I got to enjoy the fancy cookies and ogle the book types instead. I’ve always been a bit fascinated by the Charles Taylor Prize—and a little bit confused by it, too. Some of the winners have been very good over the years. (Ian Brown’s book, which won in 2010, was great.) But at the same time I’m never quite sure what they mean by “literary.”

Most years, the Taylor longlist is a big mix of biographies, popular works by academics and assorted Title-Colon-Subhead style memoirs (eg: Golden Forest: A Son’s Exploration of the West Coast Woodlands). There’s usually a lot of good work on interesting topics. But rarely does anything jump out as aggressively new. The focus always seems to be more on the subject than the form.

Partly, I think, this is because Canada doesn’t have the magazine culture the U.S. has. There just aren’t the venues here that compete to develop big feature writers that there are in the States. And, to my mind, anyway, that’s where great non-fiction comes from. The two best non-fiction books I read last year, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead and The Possessed by Elif Batuman are both collections of, mostly, magazine work. (Sullivan’s in Harper’s, GQ and the Paris Review; Batuman’s in Harper’s, the New Yorker and N+1.)

Competition among the glossies and the literary magazines down south pushes young talent to do new, better work faster. It’s why a new star, like the New Yorker’s David Grann, or Canada’s own Chris Jones at Esquire, seems to pop up every few years. In Canada, even with the Taylor Prize and the lucrative new B.C. national prize, our nonfiction writers just aren’t playing in the same world. They aren’t working from the same kind of tradition, or with the same kind of editors, that produced a John McPhee or a Joan Didion or a David Foster Wallace.

None of this is meant to slight the prize or the books or even the many, many talented Canadian magazine writers out there. People are doing fascinating, wonderful non-fiction in Canada. I think giving them money and national press exposure is an unqualified good thing. But I can’t help wishing, every year when the list comes out, for something with a little more pop, something with a voice or a structure that makes me say: “That’s it. That’s the new thing.” (Obviously, I haven’t read everything out there. I’m no doubt missing a lot of great work.)

All that aside, what struck me about this year’s shortlist was how B.C.-centric it was. It’s tough to argue, after leaving a reception at a Bay Street Bank, that the centre of the Canadian literary world is tilting west. But there’s no doubt that in fiction and non-, B.C. is a power.

Consider today’s short-listed writers:

· JJ Lee, nominated for The Measure of a Man, is a Vancouver Sun columnist and CBC Vancouver commentator.

· Wade Davis, nominated for Into the Silence, is a B.C. native who splits his time between Vancouver and Washington, D.C.

· Charlotte Gill, Eating Dirt, lives on the Sunshine Coast northwest of Vancouver.

· Madeline Sonik, Afflictions and Departures, wrote much of her book as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Victoria, where she now teaches.

· Andrew Westoll, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, lives in Ontario, but has an MFA from the University of British Columbia.

I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about that fact. But some credit has to go to province’s two big writing schools, at UBC and UVic, not just for shaping authors like Westoll and Sonik (and 2011 Giller winner Esi Edugyan) but also for creating literary communities those cities now enjoy.