HIlary Weston with her husband Galen in 2010Tom Sandler
The notoriously unrewarding business of writing non-fiction books in Canada gained a double dosed of glamour and money yesterday with the announcement of the $60,000 Writers' Trust Hilary Weston Prize.
Billed as the richest award for factual writing in Canada, the prize and the autumn gala at which it will be announced are intended to do for the craft what the Giller Prize does for Canadian fiction in the busy fall season, according to its founding sponsor, the former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario.
Citing the work of Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan, Jane Jacobs and Margaret MacMillan while making the announcement in Toronto at Holt Renfrew, the family department store, Ms. Weston said she hoped the prize would help revitalize a form of writing that is becoming increasingly difficult to undertake in Canada.
"As I get older I really feel passionate about non-fiction because of its broad reach," she said, adding that the prize is intended in part to underwrite the enormous research the best non-fiction books require.
Ms. Weston's commitment transforms the unsponsored orphan of the Writers' Trust awards program into a sparkling Cinderella with an appropriately glamorous coming-out next fall, in the same few weeks when winners of the group's own fiction prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Awards are announced.
Unlike the remainder of the Writers' Trust prizes, which are typically presented as a group at a low-key ceremony, the Hilary Weston Prize will get its own gala, potentially to be televised by CBC.
The new prize elbows into an increasingly crowded schedule that currently makes room for three other major non-fiction awards: the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize, the $40,000 British Columbia National Award and the $25,000 Governor General's award.
In addition to $60,000 for the winner, the new Prize will award $5,000 to as many as four finalists. In the meantime, organizers are busy finalizing the rules and finding a suitably posh place for the inaugural gala.
"All we know is that we've got a lot of reading to be done," Ms. Weston said.