Non-Fiction Award 2013:

Winner:
Candace Savage:
A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape

note: this book also won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction

Description: When Candace Savageand her partner buy a house in the romantic little town of Eastend, she has no idea what awaits her. At first she enjoys exploring the area around their new home, including the boyhood haunts of the celebrated American writer Wallace Stegner, the backroads of the Cypress Hills, the dinosaur skeletons at the T.Rex Discovery Centre, the fossils to be found in the dust-dry hills. She also revels in her encounters with the wild inhabitants of this mysterious land -- two coyotes in a ditch at night, their eyes glinting in the dark; a deer at the window; a cougar pussy-footing it through a gully a few minutes' walk from town.

But as Savage explores further, she uncovers a darker reality -- a story of cruelty and survival set in the still-recent past -- and finds that she must reassess the story she grew up with as the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of prairie homesteaders....Syndetics

Nominees:

Lynn Gidluck:
Visionaries, Crusaders, and Firebrands: The Idealistic Canadians Who Built the NDP
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Muriel A. Jarvis, (and Mary E. Vandergoot):
Thin Pink Lines: My Life as a Nurse & Beyond
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Alexandra Popoff:
The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants
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To see the list of all winners and nominees, go to the All Time Award Nominees List by Year posted by the Saskatchewan Book Awards.

Saskatchewan Book Awards winners were announced on April 28

Here are some of the Non-Fiction Awards. For the full list, go to the link above:

Book of the Year:

* Darren R. Préfontaine: Gabriel Dumont : li chef michif in images and in words
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Non-Fiction Award:

* Curtis R. McManus: Happyland: A History of the "Dirty Thirties" in Saskatchewan, 1914-1937

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* Mark Cronlund Anderson and Carmen L. Robertson won the Scholarly Writing Award, the First Peoples’ Writing Award and the Regina Book Award for their book Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers.
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The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction was awarded to

Andrew Westoll for The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery

Journalist Andrew Westoll recounts his time spent at the Fauna Sanctuary in rural Quebec as a volunteer caregiver for a family of chimpanzees rescued from a research lab.

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The Short List:

Wade Davis: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

Charlotte Gill: Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

JJ Lee: The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit


Madeline Sonik: Afflictions & Departures: Essays

Canada Reads 2012 Contest (click here to go to the CBC Canada Reads website. You can read more about the books and the authors)

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WINNER:

Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre

Something Fierce is playwright and actor Carmen Aguirre's memoir about coming of age in the Chilean resistance movement.

The Author: Carmen Aguirre grew up amid the terror and defiance of the Chilean resistance movement.

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THE OTHER NOMINEES:

The Game by Ken Dryden

The Game is still widely regarded as the best book about hockey ever written, even almost 30 years after its original publication in 1983. In it, legendary goalie Ken Dryden chronicles his 1979 season with the Montreal Canadiens.

The Author: Ken Dryden was a legendary goalie for the Montreal Canadians. He has written five books and served as a Liberal MP for seven years.

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On a Cold Road by Dave Bidini

On a Cold Road is the book that marked Rheostatics guitarist Dave Bidini's transition from rock star to writer, a chronicle of the band's 1996 cross-Canada tour with The Tragically Hip.

The Author: Dave Bidini used to be a guitarist for the iconic rock band the Rheostatics. He has published 10 books, and writes a regular column in the National Post.

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Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat

Prisoner of Tehran is Marina Nemat's harrowing account of the two years she spent as a teenager in a political prison in Iran after the Islamic Revolution.

The Author: Marina Nemat grew up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and followed up the success of her first book with a sequel, After Tehran, about her life in Canada.

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The Tiger by John Vaillant

The Tiger is a shocking true story about the struggle between the citizens of a remote Russian village and the ferocious, endangered Siberian tiger who is out for revenge against the poachers who survive by destroying his kind.

The Author: John Vaillant has worked as a journalist since 1998, exploring the often surprising collisions between man and nature.
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This is a selection from the Globe & Mail's 100 best-reviewed titles of 2011 - Non-Fiction

For the complete list, go to this link - the non-fiction starts about half way down the page.
Excerpts from the Globe & Mail reviews appear below each title.

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The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945 by Ian Kershaw

In this remarkable book, Kershaw (author of a definitive biography of Hitler) tells the story of the mass murder and homicidal suicide of the Third Reich in its final days with a mastery of detail so compelling that I could not put it down. A magnificent account of the “twilight of the Nazi gods.” – Jonathan Steinberg

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Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean

Orlean gives us an extraordinary narrative about the careers of the many Rin Tin Tins and the man who “discovered” the canine silent film star. Deeper, larger issues are brought to bear as well: our need for creating permanence; the promise of friendship and how we find completion; our abiding wish to be remembered. – M.A.C. Farrant

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Blue Nights by Joan Didion

This book about the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana, is heartbreaking in part because it is somewhat jumbled. The shards of memory, shimmering as they are, do not finally fit together, quite. Instead, in its elliptical, kinetic way, the book offers something braver than coherence: a raw and rare integrity that resists resolution. – Leah Hager Cohen

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Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Economic rationality, psychologist Kahneman argues in his brilliant work on how we make choices, is all about coherence and logical consistency. This is a magisterial work, stunning in its ambition, infused with knowledge, laced with wisdom, informed by modesty and deeply humane. If you can read only one book this year, read this one. – Janice Gross Stein

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DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny

British writer Glenny’s history of how cyber-crime went from the domain of lone-wolf hackers to a highly organized criminal underworld is entertaining, well written and any number of insightful diagnoses, such as the competitions between hackers, or the reasons why law-enforcement agencies have such difficulty working together. – Jeffrey Hunker

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When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada by Peter C. Newman

The end of the Liberals and the rise and fall of Michael Ignatieff animate this important, timely and engaging book, the first to look at the 2011 election, probably a watershed in our history. Few do substantive, long-form journalism like this any more, and no one does it with octogenarian Newman’s eye, ear and ego. – Andrew Cohen
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Charles Foran: Mordecai: The Life & Times

Mordecai: The Life & Times by Charles Foran is biography as high art, illuminating not only the character of Canada’s most provocative writer, but also, in the most vivid and compelling fashion, the times and places in which he lived. This is a grand, sweeping work that sets the standard for future literary biography.

Go to the Canada Council for the Arts site for the full list of winners.

Vancouver's John Vaillant has recently won British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for his book The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. The $40,000 award is Canada's richest prize for non-fiction. Congratulations to John Vaillant!

The Tiger: a True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

Summary: Deep in the frigid Siberian wilderness, an Amur tiger hunts. Fearsome strength is at the command of a calculating mind that relentlessly stalks its newest prey: man. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the taiga, John Vaillant provides an unforgettable true account of a lethal collision between man and beast in a remote Russian village during the late 1990's.

Congratulations to Alexandra Popoff for picking up the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Award for Best Non-Fiction!

Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography by Alexandra Popoff

Summary: Based on a cache of new, original sources, Alexandra Popoff debunks the common perception that Sophia Tolstoy was a bitter, unsupportive wife.

The 2010 Governor General Literary Awards were handed out last week. Here are the two big winners in the categories of best non-fiction and best poetry:

BEST NON-FICTION

Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada by Allan Casey

Summary: Lakes define not only Canada's landscape but the national imagination. Blending writing on nature, travel, and science, award-winning journalist Allan Casey systematically explores how the country's history and culture originates at the lakeshore. Lakeland describes a series of interconnected journeys by the author, punctuated by the seasons and the personalities he meets along the way including aboriginal fishery managers, fruit growers, boat captains, cottagers, and scientists. Together they form an evocative portrait of these beloved bodies of water and what they mean, from sapphire tarns above the Rocky Mountain tree line to the ponds of western Newfoundland.

BEST POETRY

Boxing the Compass by Richard Greene

Summary: A poetry collection of mid-life reassessments that also makes room for the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp, tone-deaf church choirs, the last of the Newfoundland whalers, and vividly remembered Portuguese fishermen. Spiritually searching and intellectually rich, Richard Greene’s third book —which ranges from intimate to ironic to satiric —shuns easy answers in poems of unfashionable eloquence comprised of colloquial textures, clear-eyed narratives, political subtexts, and no-nonsense introspection.

Here are the nominees and winner of the 10th annual Writers’ Trust Awards!

WINNER. James FitzGerald for What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son’s Quest to Redeem the Past. James FitzGerald's What Disturbs Our Blood is a brave and compelling journey into the world of mental illness, and a riveting look at the father-son divides in a family of talented over-achievers. While plumbing the depths of one family's tragedy, FitzGerald manages to tie in important Canadian medical discoveries, two World Wars, and the history of Ireland in an ambitious, yet riveting narrative.

Ross King for Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven. Defiant Spirits traces the artistic development of Tom Thomson and the future members of the Group of Seven over a dozen years in Canadian history beginning in 1912. This “group biography” is rigorously researched and drawn from archival documents and letters. It details not only the lives of the members of the Group of Seven but also the political and social history of Canada during a time when art exhibitions were venues for debates about Canadian national identity and cultural worth.

John Theberge and Mary Theberge for The Ptarmigan’s Dilemma: An Exploration into How Life Organizes and Supports Itself. This is a ground-breaking explanation of evolution for non-scientists. Drawing on breakthrough research and their extensive field and lab work, wildlife biologists John and Mary Theberge examine the mechanism of natural selection and dramatic evolutionary change.

Merrily Weisbord's The Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das. The late Kamala Das is one of India’s most beloved and controversial literary figures. Dubbed by the tabloid press as “The Love Queen of Malabar,” she was hailed and reviled as the first Indian woman to write a memoir about love and desire. Merrily Weisbord found Das’s work so compelling that she travelled to South India to meet her and initiated a decade-long friendship.

Sarah Leavitt for Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me. In this powerful graphic memoir, Sarah Leavitt uses the medium of comics to tell the story of her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. In spare black and white drawings and clear, candid prose, Leavitt shares her family’s journey through a harrowing range of emotions while learning to cope and managing to find moments of happiness.

Synopses from the Writers' Trust of Canada website.