Charles Taylor Prize 2011

The five finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize were announced January 11, 2011.
The prize is "awarded to the author whose book best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style, and a subtlety of thought and perception," according to the Taylor Prize website.

http://www.thecharlestaylorprize.ca/

Previous winners:

2000--Wayne Johnston for Baltimore’s Mansion, published by Knopf Canada;
2002--Carol Shields for Jane Austen, published by Penguin Books Canada;
2004--Isabel Huggan for Belonging: Home Away From Home;
2005--Charles Montgomery for The Last Heathen: Encounters With Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia, published by Douglas & McIntyre;
2006--J. B. MacKinnon for Dead Man in Paradise, published by Douglas & McIntyre;
2007--Rudy Wiebe for Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, published by Knopf Canada;
2008--Richard Gwyn for John A.: The Man Who Made Us, The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald, Volume One: 1815 – 1816, published by Random House Canada;
2009--Tim Cook for Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917 – 1918, Volume Two, published by Viking Canada Canada.

Finalist for 2010:
1] Stevie Cameron for On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women, published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada;
2] Charles Foran for Mordecai: The Life & Times, published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada;
3] Ross King for Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, published by Douglas & McIntyre/ McMichael Canadian Art Collection;
4] George Sipos for The Geography of Arrival: A Memoir, published by Gaspereau Press;
5] Merrily Weisbord for The Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Charles B. P. Taylor (1935-1997) was a Canadian-born journalist with the Globe & Mail. His books include:
Reporter in Red China (1966)
Snow Job : Canada, the United States and Vietnam 1954 to 1973 (1974)
China Hands : The Globe and Mail Peking (editor) (1984)
Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern (1977) [Biographical portraits of Scott Symons, James Houston, Emily Carr, Herbert Norman, Bishop William White, and Brigadier James Sutherland Brown.]