TORONTO – Former Charles Taylor Prize winner J.B. MacKinnon of Vancouver is once again in the running for the $25,000 non-fiction award, which was recently renamed the RBC Taylor Prize.
MacKinnon, who won the 2006 prize for Dead Man in Paradise and served as a juror in 2008, has made the 2014 long list for The Once and Future World: Nature As it Was, As it Is, As it Could Be.
That book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction and is on the long list for the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
The 12 Taylor Prize contenders announced Wednesday also include Thomas King of Guelph, Ont., for The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, and Graeme Smith for The Dogs are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan.
Both those titles were also Writers’ Trust finalists and are in the running for the B.C. National Award.
Toronto’s Mary Janigan made the Taylor Prize cut for Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: The West Versus the Rest Since Confederation, which won the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize earlier this year and was a finalist for the Donner Prize.
Carolyn Abraham of Toronto is a nominee for The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, Legend and the Genes that Bind Us, which was a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award earlier this year and is on the long list for the B.C. National Award.
Also up for both the Taylor Prize and B.C. National Award are The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 by Margaret MacMillan of Oxford, England and The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial that Shocked a Century by Ottawa’s Charlotte Gray.
The Taylor Prize long list also includes:
— How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit by Witold Rybcynski of Philadelphia
— Arthur Erickson: An Architect’s Life by Vancouver’s David Stouck
— Without Honour: The True Story of the Shafia Family and the Kingston Canal Murders by Ron Tripp of Calgary
— Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter: Growing Up with a Gay Dad by Alison Wearing of Stratford, Ont.
— Little Ship of Fools: 16 Rowers, 1 Improbable Boat, 7 Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic by Charles Wilkins of Thunder Bay, Ont.
This year’s jurors, Coral Ann Howells, James Polk, and Andrew Westoll, read 124 submissions from 45 publishers.
They’ll reveal the short list on Jan. 15 and the winner on March 10 in Toronto.
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