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The Charles Taylor Prize, honouring excellence in English-language literary non-fiction, has been a fixture of the Canadian cultural landscape since 2000. Starting as a biennial honour awarded at a breakfast, it morphed in 2004 into its present annual incarnation, handing out $25,000 to the first-place finisher and $2,500 to each runner-up.

In this day and age, 10 years is a long time for anything. The Beatles lasted less than eight years in their most famous iteration. But for all its traditions – the three-member jury, the now-lunchtime awards ceremony in Toronto, the short list of “not less than three titles and not more than five,” the $25,000 cheque, the crystal trophy for the winner – the Taylor has not “switched into glide.” The term “literary non-fiction” has proven so broad that on pretty much every occasion, both the Taylor's short-listed titles and its winner have been surprises.

Certainly that's Noreen Taylor's experience – and she's been the prize's primary driver, shaper and spokesperson since its inception. “There was one collection of essays I thought was going to be on the list this year, for sure,” she said over coffee last week near her home in Toronto's Forest Hill district. “I thought it was fantastic.”

But, no, the 2008-09 jury – Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, former Canada Council head Shirley Thomson, academic-author Warren Cariou – went all historical on her, choosing three “big-subject” books from a field of 135. Books that Noreen Taylor confessed to not having read when the short list was revealed last month.

She has since done so, of course.

At 62, Taylor is not only a vivacious and stylish personality, painter, former teacher and current chair of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, she's a voracious reader. Just don't ask her which one of this year's three finalists –Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott; Ana Siljak's Angel of Vengeance: The ‘Girl Assassin,' The Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World; and Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918 by Tim Cook – is her favourite, or which will triumph shortly after noon (ET) today. Not only does she not know – “This prize is really about finding the three best jurors we can and respecting their choices. … We leave them alone” – she's never correctly guessed any of the seven previous winners.

It's well-known that Taylor started the prize to honour the memory of her late (and third) husband, Charles Taylor, the famous (and famously wealthy) horse-breeder, journalist and, yes, writer of non-fiction (Six Journeys: a Canadian Pattern and Radical Tories: the Conservative Tradition in Canada). Their marriage lasted 10 years, all of them lived under the cloud of an end-stage melanoma diagnosis determined just two weeks after their June, 1987, wedding.

“At that time, Charles was told he had six months to live,” Taylor observed. “So with mortality being a lot closer at hand than it is for most people, issues pertaining to what one would like to do now and afterward became subjects of certain conversations.”

In his last decade, Taylor had a steady gig as a juror for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a non-fiction award given out annually to the best book, in English, in international affairs. “He loved doing it,” Taylor recalled. At the same time, he was tracking the success of the Giller Prize for Canadian fiction that former Montreal businessman Jack Rabinovitch had started in 1994 to recognize his late wife, Doris Giller.

As a young adult, Taylor had strived to write “The Great Novel,” his widow said. “But he was awful at it. So what do you do then? You still want to be a great writer: Are you lesser because you're not writing fiction?”

Two weeks before his death, at 62 in July, 1997, Charles Taylor told his wife that he thought an award, funded by the Taylor family, should be established to recognize Canadian writers of non-fiction, or, in his preferred term, belles lettres. “And I said, ‘Yes, yes, we'll talk about that,'” she laughed. “Because I actually didn't think the end was going to be in, like, 10 days. So I didn't get to say, ‘Okay, dear, what do you mean? How do I do this?' … I blew it.”

Not really, of course. About seven months after her husband's death, Noreen Taylor was a woman “on a mission. If Charles said he wanted something done, I was gonna get it done. If I said I'd do it, it'd happen.” She started to canvas a range of friends, acquaintances and relatives – among them, Taylor's sister and former Montreal bookseller Judith Mappin, Margaret Atwood, Giller Prize organizer David Staines, and June Callwood – about her husband's vision. By February, 1999, after considerable research, she had a plan in hand for its realization.

Today, she acknowledged, “there's a sense that we've fulfilled our initial goals.” People may quibble about the short list or the winner, but everything associated with the prize is keenly anticipated and discussed. It also seems to have caught the fancy of publishers: Penguin Group (Canada), for instance, reprinted Sugar and Shock Troops after they received Taylor nods.

But, Taylor said, “my methodology is to assess and monitor: What's improvable? What can I get rid of? … All your friends are going to tell you you're brilliant. I have to go beyond that, however. I want to get to the truth even if I don't want to hear it.” Which explains why last year she had prize administrator June Dickenson conduct a standardized survey of 14 Canadian publishers as to the effectiveness of the Taylor and what its function might be in the years ahead.

One knock some publishers have had is that the span of the prize is, in fact, too broad – that non-fiction readers tend to be topic-based rather than literarily inclined, thereby muting the prize's impact. As Taylor voiced the complaint: “I only read about Sir John A. Macdonald, I don't read about Pierre Trudeau; I only read memoirs, so I don't read history.”

Taylor, however, doesn't buy it. “I'm trying to say there's a wealth of stories out there and if – through a radio broadcast, or a newspaper article, or our Internet site – someone becomes interested in one different subject area, he or she might realize their area of reading is larger and broader than they thought. I don't think non-fiction is as much about narrow-casting as some might suggest. I see this from my own reading pattern: Whether its fiction or non-fiction, if the story is gripping, I'll keep turning those pages.”