Afghan war memoir honoured
Smith wins Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction
Graeme Smith has won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for NonFiction.
Smith has likely spent more time covering Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan than any other Western journalist. He first arrived in September 2005 to cover the country’s parliamentary elections and was the Globe and Mail’s primary correspondent until 2011. He left, only to return. Smith currently lives in Kabul, where he works as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group.
Last month he published his longawaited chronicle of the conflict, The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan, published by Knopf Canada, a division of Random House Canada. On Monday, Smith and his book received the Weston prize, Canada’s top award for non-fiction.
“The Dogs Are Eating Them Now is his painfully detailed, eyebrowraising account of what he saw during his six years of reporting on that effort for the Globe and Mail,” the prize jury said, calling it “a tragic mix of cultural ignorance, miscommunication, greed, brutality, and political naiveté that no amount of individual courage and dedication could ultimately overcome.”
The judges call the book “a graphic but determinedly even-handed memoir that does much to counter the reams of official spin this topic has endured over the years.”
The prize, worth $60,000, is the most lucrative annual literary award for a work of non-fiction in Canada.
Writing in the National Post, Matt Lennox called The Dogs Are Eating Them Now “an accomplished and vibrant work” and said it was “vital that every Canadian reads it.”
The other finalists were Thomas King for The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America; J.B. MacKinnon for The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be; Andrew Steinmetz for This Great Escape: The Case of Michael Paryla; and Priscila Uppal for Projection: Encounters with my Runaway Mother. They each receive $5,000.
“It is a tremendous honour to showcase these five extraordinary writers and their powerful stories,” said Hilary Weston, the former lieutenant-governor of Ontario, who became the prize’s namesake in 2011.
The finalists were chosen by a jury composed of Hal Niedzviecki, a writer and critic; Andreas Schroeder, who teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia; and Candace Savage, who won the prize in 2012 for A Geography of Blood. Samantha Nutt, founder and executive director of War Child Canada, and Evan Solomon, a broadcaster and author, joined the jury to help choose a winner.