Nominee Tim Cook, author of The Necessary War, Volume One: Canadians Fighting the Second World War 1939-43.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
The longlist for the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, one of the most lucrative literary prizes in Canada, was revealed on Thursday.
The ten nominees for the $40,000 prize vary in style, substance, and scope, ranging from the Arctic Circle to the afterlife, and from the battlefields of the Second World War to the future of urban living.
The nominees are Alison Pick for Between Gods, a memoir of spiritual awakening; Karyn L. Freedman for the harrowing One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery; Joseph Heath for Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to our Politics, our Economy, and our Lives; Michael Harris for his first book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection; Patricia Pearson for Opening Heaven's Door: What the Dying May be Trying to Tell Us About Where They're Going; James Raffan for his globe-spanning travelogue Circling the Midnight Sun: Culture and Change in the Invisible Arctic; Shelley Wright for Our Ice is Vanishing: A History of Inuit, Newcomers, and Climate Change; Charles Montgomery for Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design; Chantal Hébert for The Morning After: The 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was; and Tim Cook for The Necessary War, Volume One: Canadians Fighting the Second World War 1939-43.
The shortlist will be revealed later this month, while the winner will be declared in early 2015.
The jury for this year's prize was comprised of John Fraser, Anne Giardini and chair Jared Bland, arts editor of The Globe and Mail.