Office of the Premier
Premier Christy Clark and British Columbia Achievement chair Keith Mitchell are pleased to announce that Charlotte Gill is the winner of the 2012 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for "Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe".
Gill was presented with the $40,000 prize at a ceremony in Vancouver, which also celebrated finalists Brian Fawcett for "Human Happiness", Andrew Westoll for "The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery" and Joel Yanofsky for "Bad Animals: A Father's Accidental Education in Autism".
"It's a privilege for British Columbia to honour Canada's finest writers of non-fiction", said Premier Clark. "The authors we celebrated today provide us with a unique perspective on the complexities of our world and help define us as Canadians. I congratulate Charlotte Gill and the finalists for their contributions to Canadian literature."
Now in its eighth year, British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction is one of Canada's major national book prizes and the only one to originate in B.C. The annual award is presented by the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, an independent foundation established by the Province in 2003 to celebrate excellence in the arts, humanities, enterprise and community service.
"For eight years, the British Columbia Achievement Foundation's National Book Award has showcased Canadian writers from British Columbia to Newfoundland", said Mitchell. "All have stimulated our national conversation and have demonstrated excellence in the field of non-fiction writing."
The 2012 jury panel members for the BC National Award are panel chair, Paul Whitney, former city librarian at Vancouver Public Library and presently a consultant for publishing and public policy; Patricia Graham, former editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun and current vice president of digital for Pacific Newspaper Group; and award-winning author and editor Shari Graydon from Ottawa.
The jury cited "Eating Dirt" as "...an insider's perspective on the gruelling, remote and largely ignored world of that uniquely modern-day 'tribe', the tree planter". Gill's description of the forest "brings it vividly to life in all its mystic grandeur with striking details and evocative analogies, using intelligence, verve and humour to illuminate the dangers that live within, and threaten from without".
Background information about British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction is available at: http://www.bcachievement.com/nonfiction
Contact:
Nora Newlands
Executive Director
BC Achievement Foundation
604 618-6949
