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Veteran political commentator and author Richard Gwyn won the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize for excellence in literary non-fiction at a gala luncheon ceremony yesterday in Toronto. Gwyn, who is 74 this year, took the $25,000 first prize for John A: The Man Who Made Us: The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald, Vol. One: 1815-1867, besting four other finalists.
The win was something of an anomaly for the Taylor prize. Since its creation in 2000, its juries, regardless of their composition, have tended to favour books of a personal, autobiographical or family nature, not works of historical biography or social history. Until yesterday, the one exception was the late Carol Shields's win in 2002 for her biography of the early 19th century English novelist Jane Austen.
Gwyn, a long-time columnist for the Toronto Star, said anger was one of his primary motivations in tackling the life of Canada's first prime minister. “There had been no Macdonald biography for over half a century [the last being Donald Creighton's two-volume epic], which would not have happened in any other country I could imagine,” he observed. “I wanted to give Canadians a chance to rediscover their own history.”
The three-member jury – Ottawa-based historian Charlotte Gray, Vancouver journalist and author J.B. MacKinnnon and former Liberal cabinet minister and deputy prime minister John Manley – lauded Gwyn's 510-page biography on “Canada's George Washington” for being written “from a 21st-century perspective while painting for his readers a vivid image of 19th-century Canada: its society, customs, character and politics.” Gwyn is currently preparing the second (and concluding ) volume of the biography, spanning the years 1868-1891, tentatively scheduled for publication in 2010 by Random House Canada.
The winner of the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, Richard Gwyn, is congratulated by Noreen Taylor at Monday's award ceremony in Toronto at the King Edward Hotel.
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The other nominated books were: Kas ztner's Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust by Anna Porter; From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People by Lorna Goodison (the winner last month of Canada's largest prize for non-fiction, the $40,000 B.C. Award for Canadian Non-fiction); Lost Genius: The Story of a Forgotten Musical Maverick (a biography of Hungarian-born pianist and composer Ervin Nyiregyhazi) by Kevin Bazzana; and The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son by David Gilmour. Each runner-up was awarded $2,000.
Going into final deliberations yesterday morning, Gray said “none of the jurors had a favourite or had the sense that one book was head and shoulders above the others . . . It was incredibly hard to eliminate any of them.” Moreover, “it is extremely hard to compare a memoir where essentially the author can pick and choose their own material and shape it, and a history which is obligated to the facts. [But] that wasn't the criterion; we didn't say this year we're going to do a history, not a memoir.”
Earlier in the ceremony, Gray said the jurors – who considered almost 140 books, all published last year – were looking for “a sense of storytelling . . . [something] that grabs the reader's attention and keeps it.”
Gwyn, whose previous credits include an award-winning biography of another prime minister (Pierre Elliott Trudeau), 1980's The Northern Magus, described his Taylor win as “a double award, in a sense. You've gotta write a solid book of non-fiction; your facts are right and all the rest of it, but you've got to write in a way that pulls the reader in, that makes it accessible to the ordinary person . . . The truth is, a lot of our history is written in a very dull way.”
The Taylor prize was originally established as a biennial award, by Noreen Taylor to honour the memory of her late husband, Toronto journalist/author/horse breeder Charles Taylor. It became an annual prize in 2004 and to date seven writers have been honoured with the top award.
