There was a standing ovation for Ian Brown at the Charles Taylor Prize banquet.
To explain why they chose his book The Boy in the Moon as this year’s grand prize winner, the jury lauded The Globe and Mail writer for his sensitive exploration of “a netherworld where medicine and morality meet” and for telling the story of his disabled son “with artless candour, quirky humour and unsparing detail.”
Now in its tenth year, the Charles Taylor prize is named for another former Globe writer, known for his graceful writing style. The award is administered his widow, Noreen Taylor, and although it is no longer the richest prize for non-fiction in Canada - the government of British Columbia offers a similar prize worth $40,000, which was also won this year by Ian Brown - the Taylor prize emphasizes the literary quality of its honorees.
The prize goes to the author whose book “best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style, and a subtlety of thought and perception,” according to organizers. The foundation’s aim to help promote such work, which this year included an unprecedented publicity campaign with exposure on national television. This week two of the nominees - John English’s Just Watch Me and Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon - appeared on the Maclean’s bestseller list.
Previous Taylor prize winners include the late Carol Shields for Jane Austen , Rudy Wiebe for Of this Earth: A Menonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest and Richard Gwyn for John A.; The Man Who Made Us. Last year’s prize went to Tim Cook for Shock Troops, the second volume of his history of Canadian troops in the First World War.
Other finalists this year included Maclean’s magazine editor Kenneth Whyte for The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of Willam Randolph Hearst, which was also nominated for the B.C. award, and historian John English for Just Watch Me, the second volume of his biography of Pierre Trudeau (the first volume of English’s biography, Citizen of the World, was a Taylor prize finalist in 2007).
Perhaps to balance the politics of the list, jurors also picked Daniel Poliquin’s shorter, more interpretive Rene Levesque as a finalist for the 2010 Taylor prize.
The three-person jury judging this year’s prize comprises Montreal translator Sheila Fischman and two Ottawans - authors Andrew Cohen and Tim Cook, last year’s winner.
