Globe writer Ian Brown.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
Globe and Mail reporter Ian Brown is one of four writers nominated for this year's $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, awarded annually to a Canadian author whose book, according to prize organizers, "best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style and a subtlety of thought and expression."
Mr. Brown was nominated for The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for his Disabled Son, a memoir that began as a three-part series published two years ago in The Globe. It describes the life of Walker Brown, born with a rare disorder that renders him unable to speak or eat, and his family's struggle to care for and understand him.
Reviewing The Boy in the Moon in The Globe, author and broadcaster Paula Todd described it as "astonishing, both in its content and its triumph over form." The three-person Taylor Prize jury described it as "deeply discomfiting and deeply affecting."
Fellow journalist Kenneth Whyte, editor-in-chief of Maclean's magazine, was nominated for The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst , lauded as "a breathtaking new masterwork in U.S. history and in the history of U.S. journalism" in a Globe review by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor David Shribman.
Two political biographers round out the list of nominees for the 2010 Taylor prize: University of Waterloo professor of history John English was nominated for Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Trudeau, 1968-2000, while Montreal author and former Giller Prize nominee Daniel Poliquin earned a nod for René Lévesque, a biography of Mr. Trudeau's most outstanding opponent.
In a statement accompanying the nominations, the jury praised Just Watch Me as "a memorable portrait of Trudeau at full flood … drawn with authority, humanity and sympathy."
Mr. Poliquin's René Lévesque , a surprise nominee published as part of Penguin Canada's Extraordinary Canadians series, earned praise as "a high-octane narrative" that is "richly insightful and deftly written."
Random House Canada and its Knopf Canada subsidiary published all three of the other nominated books.
Named for a former Globe and Mail correspondent and author Charles Taylor, the prize is "in a class by itself in Canada, a country that favours fiction," juror Andrew Cohen declared in announcing the shortlist at Toronto's King Edward Hotel yesterday, adding that publishers submitted a total of 125 books for consideration.
Others, including the sponsors of this year's British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, might disagree. A relative upstart in the realm of literary awards, the $40,000 B.C. national award is one of the richest. Both The Boy in the Moon and The Uncrowned King were nominated as finalists for the award late last year.
The 2010 fact-writing prize season officially begins in Vancouver next Friday, January 15, when the provincially sponsored B.C. Achievement Foundation announces the winner of its prize. The Charles Taylor Prize is scheduled to be awarded February 8 in Toronto.