Longlist for the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize navigates themes of exploration, discovery

Tanya Talaga. Talaga’s investigation into the deaths of seven Indigenous teenagers, all of whom died in Thunder Bay, was named last week as a short-list contender for the 2018 BC National Award for Canadian Non-FictionThe Globe and Mail

How to find love, how to find a shortcut from Russia to North America, how to find solitude and how to find Canada on the map – these are among the subject matters of the 10 longlisted books for the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize, one of Canada's highest honours for literary non-fiction.

Exploration and discovery are consistent themes in this year's books nominated for the $30,000 prize. With Albertan Stephen R. Bown's Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on Bering's Great Voyage to Alaska, the tragic adventure of 18th-century cartographer Vitus Bering (who died on a barren Aleutian island while his shipwrecked crewmates dealt with angry foxes and scurvy) is examined.

From Hamilton's Adam Shoalts, A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land everything from 16th-century Viking charts to Champlain's detailed drawings of New France is used in an attempt to answer Northrop Frye's famous question about Canada: "Where is here?"

Nominated titles from Vancouver writers Michael Harris (Solitude: A Singular Life in a Crowded World) and Mandy Len Catron (How to Fall in Love with Anyone) represent a more personal sort of discovery.

The 10 longlisted books were selected by former Ontario MPP Christine Elliott, author and Simon Fraser University chancellor Anne Giardini and prominent Toronto editor James Polk. The three-member jury considered a record-breaking 153 non-fiction books submitted by 110 Canadian and international publishers.

Perhaps the most high-profile title nominated for the 17th-annual award is Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City, by veteran Toronto journalist Tanya Talaga. Her investigation into the deaths of seven Indigenous teenagers, all of whom died in Thunder Bay, was named last week as a short-list contender for the 2018 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

The five other Taylor Prize long-listers include Hamilton's Daniel Coleman (for Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place), Vancouver's Mohamed Fahmy and Carol Shaben (The Marriott Cell: An Epic Journey from Cairo's Scorpion Prison to Freedom), Toronto's James Maskalyk (Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine), Fredericton's Jan Wong (Apron Strings: Navigating Food and Family in France, Italy and China) and Toronto's Max Wallace (for In the Name of Humanity, an account of the tense endgame of the Nazi reign in Germany).

The prize was established in 2000 in honour of author and former Globe and Mail correspondent Charles Taylor. Previous winners include Carol Shields, Thomas King and Ian Brown, whose award-winning The Boy in the Moon was adapted this year for a play that premiered at Toronto's Crow's Theatre. Last year's prize went to Ross King for Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies.

The Taylor Prize short list will be announced at a press conference on Jan. 10, with the winner revealed at a gala luncheon in Toronto on Feb. 26.