Richler Biographer Wins $60,000 Literary Prize

By Athena McKenzie

Charles Foran has won the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, for his biography Mordecai: The Life and Times. The $60,000 prize, sponsored by the Hon. Hilary M. Weston, is the richest annual literary award for a book of nonfiction published in Canada. Foran’s account of the famed Montreal writer Mordecai Richler has already won the 2011 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and is a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.

The other finalists for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize were Charlotte Gill for Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, Richard Gwyn for Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times; Volume Two: 1867-1891, Grant Lawrence for Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound and Ray Robertson for Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live. Each will receive $5,000.