A winning bard of the Rock

Wayne Johnston certainly knows what it's like to lose.

Last year, the Newfoundland-born writer earned prestigious Giller Prize and Governor-General's Award nominations for his widely acclaimed novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

But the big brass ring of literary prizedom eluded him -- until yesterday, when Johnston won the inaugural $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction.

The Toronto-based writer, grandson of a Newfoundland blacksmith and son of a federal fisheries inspector, received the award for Baltimore's Mansion (Knopf), a sprawling memoir of three generations of his own family and, as he said in his acceptance remarks, "of the nation of Newfoundland and Labrador."

The prize was given at a gala eggs-benedict breakfast ceremony at Toronto's posh Four Seasons Hotel, attended by about 200 luminaries of the country's literary community.

"I know what it's like to be on the non-winning side of a prize," Johnston said after receiving a standing ovation. "I was stunned to kind of feel like it was my party. Just for a little while. For any writer, it only lasts for a few minutes."

Winning, he allowed, is better than losing, although, "I don't think of the other nominees as losers, in the same way that when I was nominated for the Giller and didn't get the cheque, I didn't feel like a loser."

Johnston said the first thing he would do would be to return to work on his next book. "It's a novel and it's nowhere near finished. But I won't have to worry about promotion tours or whether I'm going to win or not win a prize, which is a great relief."

In addition to The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston, 40, is the author of four novels, including The Story of Bobby O'Malley and The Divine Ryans.

The other Taylor Prize nominees included:

Lisa Appignanesi for Losing The Dead (McArthur & Co.);

Wayson Choy for Paper Shadows (Penguin);

Michael Ignatieff for The Warrior's Honour (Penguin);

Witold Rybczynski for A Clearing in the Distance (HarperFlamingo), and

Eric Wright for Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man: A Memoir (Key Porter). The Taylor Prize, the largest of its kind in the country, commemorates the late author and journalist Charles Taylor, who died in 1997. The award is overseen by a panel of trustees, including Taylor's widow Noreen. Amid tight security, a jury of three members (writers David Macfarlane, Neil Bissoondath and Eva-Marie Kroller) made the final selection on Sunday.

Johnston, raised in Goulds, a community south of St. John's, received a BA from Memorial University and an MA from the University of New Brunswick. For three years he worked as a reporter at the St. John's Daily News.

In his acceptance speech, Johnston thanked his wife, Rose, for giving him the room he needed to write.

The Taylor Prize is the latest addition to a growing garden of annual writing awards that has enlivened and enriched Canadian publishing in recent years.

In 1994, for example, Toronto business executive Jack Rabinovitch created the $25,000 Giller Prize for the best Canadian novel or short-story collection published in English. The Giller commemorates his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller.

The $25,000 Donner Prize, set up in 1999 by the right-wing Donner Foundation, is given to the writer of the best book on public policy. This year's winner was David Gratzer, a University of Manitoba medical student and author of Code Blue: Reviving Canada's Health Care System.

The Canada Council annually hands out $10,000 Governor-General's Awards for outstanding English and French-language work in several categories, including fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, translation and children's books.

The Writers' Development Trust of Canada also administers a series of annual prizes, several of which are less than five years old.

Among them: the Marian Engel Prize ($10,000) to a female writer in mid-career; the $1,000 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Prize, to a writer under the age of 35 not yet published before in book form and alternating between poetry and short fiction; the $10,000 Drainie/Taylor Biography Prize, for the best work of biography, autobiography or personal memoir; the $2,000 Gordon Montador Award for a book of non-fiction based on contemporary social issues; the $10,000 Pearson (formerly the Viacom) Award for non-fiction; the $10,000 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award; the $15,000 W. O. Mitchell Prize to a writer for a body of work; and the newly announced $10,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Award for political writing.

In conjunction with the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia, the Writers' Development Trust also gives the $5,000 Randall Thomas Atlantic Fiction Award.

The richest writing award, however, is still the $50,000 Lionel Gelber Prize, given for the year's best book (not necessarily Canadian) on international relations.