Brown, King among five finalists for Weston prize
TORONTO Ian Brown is among the five finalists in contention for this year’s $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction.
The award-winning Torontobased author is being honoured for Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-first Year: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning? (Random House Canada).
Brown, a feature writer for the Globe and Mail, earned several accolades for his previous book, 2010’s The Boy in the Moon, which was awarded the Charles Taylor Prize, the Trillium Book Award and the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction.
Bestselling author Ross King is nominated for Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (Bond Street Books/Doubleday Canada).
The Estevan, Sask.-born writer, who is based in the U.K., is a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction for The Judgment of Paris and Leonardo and the Last Supper. King was previously nominated for the 2010 Writers’ Trust Non-fiction Prize for Defiant Spirits.
Vancouver-based journalist and author Deborah Campbell, who teaches at the University of British Columbia, is also in the running for A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War (Knopf Canada).
Award-winning writer Matti Friedman, who was born in Toronto and is now based in Jerusalem, was recognized for Pumpkinflowers: An Israeli Soldier’s Story (Signal/McClelland & Stewart).
Rounding out the list of finalists is Vancouver-based Sonja Larsen for Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary (Random House Canada).
Author and journalist Carolyn Abraham, journalism professor and author Stephen Kimber and non-fiction writer and folklorist Emily Urquhart are the jury members for this year’s prize.
The finalists were selected from 95 titles submitted by 50 publishers.
Billed as the richest annual literary award for a book of non-fiction published in Canada, the prize winner will receive $60,000. Each finalist will receive $5,000.
Established in 1997, the prize is named after former Ontario lieutenant-governor Hilary Weston.
The winner will be announced during a ceremony at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio on Nov. 2.