Hay among nominees for Weston book prize

TORONTO — Acclaimed author Elizabeth Hay is among the finalists for this year’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

The Ottawa-based novelist, who won the 2002 Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award and the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize, is a finalist with All Things Consoled: A Daughter’s Memoir (McClelland & Stewart).

The book details her role as guardian and caregiver to her parents.

A total of five authors are on the short list for the $60,000 prize, the annual literary award for a book of non-fiction by a Canadian writer.

Other finalists include Montreal’s Will Aitken for Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo Van Hove, and the Art of Resistance (University of Regina Press), about a stage production of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Antigone in Luxembourg.

Terese Marie Mailhot of Seabird Island, B.C., made the cut for Heart Berries: A Memoir (Doubleday Canada), about “her struggle to balance the beauty of her Native heritage with the often desperate and chaotic reality of life on the reservation.”

Montreal-based investigative journalist Judi Rever is in the running for In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Random House Canada) and Vancouver’s Lindsay Wong is a finalist for her debut memoir, The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family (Arsenal Pulp Press).