This morning in Toronto, the 2016 shortlist for one of the country's top non-fiction prizes was announced. It's the best kind of shortlist — one where predicting a winner from the crop of extraordinary books is virtually impossible.
RBC Taylor Prize jurors Susanne Boyce, Joseph Kertes and Stephen J. Toope selected five titles as finalists for the fifteenth iteration of the prize, honoured for their literary excellence.
2016 RBC Taylor Prize Shortlist:
Ian Brown for Sixty: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning? (Random House Canada)
Camilla Gibb for This Is Happy (Doubleday Canada)
David Halton for Dispatches from the Front: Matthew Halton, Canada's Voice at War (McClelland & Stewart)
Wab Kinew for The Reason You Walk (Viking Canada)
Rosemary Sullivan for Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (HarperCollins Publishers)
It's a powerhouse list, with Rosemary Sullivan's Weston-Prize winning biography, Trillium Award winner Camilla Gibb's buzzed-about memoir, the universally-beloved Wab Kinew's memoir, past Taylor Prize winner Ian Brown's newest offering and former CBC senior correspondent in Washington, David Halton's book about his father, an acclaimed war correspondent.
The five finalists will be present at two events before the March 7, 2016 announcement of the winner:
A free Round Table Discussion on Thursday, March 3rd at 7:00pm in the Atrium of the Toronto Reference Library (click here for tickets) and
The annual Ben McNally/The Globe and Mail Authors Brunch on Sunday, March 6th at 10:00am (click here for tickets).
The winner of the RBC Taylor Prize will receive $25,000. In addition, as part of an initiative now in its third year, the Charles Taylor Foundation and RBC will also honour an emerging writer, chosen by the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize winner. It is am admirable new program meant to connect established and emerging writers and to support talented writers in the early stages of their careers.
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