Five Canadian books have made the shortlist for the 2024 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for nonfiction.
The $75,000 award recognizes the best in Canadian nonfiction. It is the largest prize for nonfiction in Canada.
The shortlisted books are Martha Baillie’s There Is No Blue, Chase Joynt’s Vantage Points, Amy Lin’s Here After, Lisa Moore and Jack Whalen’s Invisible Prisons and Jenny Heijun Wills’ Everything and Nothing At All. The works range in topics from coping with sudden loss to a testimony of a fight for justice; this year’s books were chosen from 117 titles by 74 publishing imprints.
The shortlisted titles are available in accessible formats through the Centre of Equitable Library Access.
The books were selected by a jury of Canadian nonfiction writers: Annahid Dashtgard, Taylor Lambert and Christina Sharpe. Sharpe won last year’s prize for her book Ordinary Notes.
Other past winners include Tomson Highway, Elizabeth Hay, Jessica J. Lee and current nominee Wills for Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related in 2019 .
The Writers’ Trust of Canada is an organization that supports Canadian writers through literary awards, fellowships, financial grants, mentorships and more.
It also gives out 11 prizes in recognition of the year’s best in fiction, nonfiction and short story, as well as mid-career and lifetime achievement awards.
The Writers’ Trust has given out a nonfiction prize since 1997. Hilary Weston has sponsored the prize since 2011. As of 2023, the prize has increased to $75,000. Each remaining finalist will receive $5,000. Co-authors will split the prize money.
The winners will be announced at the Writers’ Trust awards gala on Nov. 19, 2024.
Get to know the Hilary Weston 2024 finalists and their books below.
There Is No Blue is a memoir featuring three essays about significant losses Martha Baillie experienced. It’s a response to the death of her mother, father and sister along as ruminations on what made them so alive.
Baillie is a Toronto-based author. Her novel The Incident Report was on the 2009 Giller Prize longlist and was adapted into a feature film called Darkest Miriam. Her other books include Sister Language and The Search for Heinrich Schlögel.
From the book:
When asked several years ago by a friend of mine to define love, my mother said, ‘It may be that what we love we take inside ourselves, or it may be that what we love is always out there, just out of reach.’
She accepts one more spoonful of broth, parts her lips so I can slip it in. She tells me, ‘I love you. I love you always,’ and the full warmth, the glowing truth of her feeling, enters me. It has done so before. Every now and again it has done so – I’ve permitted myself to believe her. Or it has permitted me. It being love.
Jury citation: “An elegy to the beautiful fight to keep a family together and an ode to the devastating loss when things fall apart.”
When writer and filmmaker Chase Joynt discovers his connection to media figure Marshall McLuhan by way of old family documents, he finds himself exploring a difficult past and contextualizing those experiences with other sources, media and stories. Vantage Points shows how masculinity and media impacts the stories we tell and reveals surprising connections.
Joynt is a Canadian director and writer. His most recent film, Framing Agnes, won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. His book You Only Live Twice, co-written with Mike Hoolboom was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
From the book:
WORN
(Clothing)
When I first started binding my chest, I used a Velcro back brace purchased off the shelf of the local pharmacy. When worn in reverse, the structural ribbing of the back support produced a rigid front exterior akin to medieval armour. For months, I walked around San Francisco fortified like an umpire, buxom but barricaded.
In the years that followed, I discovered that the company best known for selling chest-binding shirts to trans men was a shapewear business that primarily advertised to non-trans people. Their message was simple: you—regardless of your gender—have the purchasing power to construct your own silhouette.
Jury citation: “A remarkable nonfiction kaleidoscope. Vantage Points grapples with the long shadows cast by masculinity, heteronormativity and abuse.”
Here After tells the powerful love story between Amy Lin and her husband Kurtis and how she copes with his sudden death. Lin shares how this loss upended her ideas of grief, strength and memory.
“[Kurtis] was a man who loved living so much that I cannot fathom how he had so little time to do it,” in an interview on The Early Edition. “He was, in so many ways, just the size of the whole sky.”
He was, in so many ways, just the size of the whole sky.– Amy Lin
Lin is a Calgary-based writer whose work has been published in Ploughshares. She has also received residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. Here After is her first book.
From the book:
The first time I see Kurtis, I do not know who he is.
I am in my car, paused by a pedestrian crosswalk. He passes in front of my vehicle. He is on his way to a blind date. I am on my way to a blind date. He wears a dark blue blazer. His legs are long, his body lithe and graceful.
Why can’t I ever meet a man like that? I think. He’s gorgeous.
Jury citation: “A memoir about love, about grief, about what survives a sudden and terrible loss. Here After is a beautiful testament to surviving as the one left behind.”
The Early Edition7:39‘Here After: A Memoir”
We talk to author Amy Lin about her new book ‘Here After’ – a meditation on love, loss and mourning after the death of her beloved husband.
In Invisible Prisons, told through the prose of author Lisa Moore, Jack Whalen shares the violence and abuse he experienced as a child at a St. John’s boarding school for four years. Despite the pain he endured, he found love and satisfaction as a husband and father. After hearing about what happened to him, his daughter promised to become a lawyer to help him seek justice — and that’s just what she did. Now, Whalen’s case is part of a lawsuit that is before the courts.
“I found it terrifying to really imagine what it would be like to be a child locked in a room with no way of knowing how much time was passing, with no stimulation, no books, no television, no natural sunlight,” Moore said in an interview with CBC News. “Nothing. No conversation. I found that absolutely terrifying.”
I found it terrifying to really imagine what it would be like to be a child locked in a room with no way of knowing how much time was passing, with no stimulation, no books, no television, no natural sunlight.– Lisa Moore
Moore is a Newfoundland-based writer. Her books include February, which won Canada Reads 2013 when it was defended by Trent McClellan; Caught, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2013 and was made into a miniseries for CBC television; the YA novel Flannery and the short story collection Something for Everyone, which was on the longlist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Whalen was once imprisoned in a small cell in a St. John’s boarding school and is an advocate for justice for children who endured solitary confinement. He divides his time between Oshawa, Ont. and St. John’s.
From the book:
A newspaper article from 1972 in the St. John’s Telegram said that the Whitbourne Boys Home was a good place to get an education. Gave the young boys some discipline. Taught them how to behave.
There was nothing in that article about “the hole,” the cold and dirty cells in the basement. Nothing about how they took your socks or shoes so you couldn’t run, and how cold your feet were on the tiled floor. How cold it was. These were the things they did to destroy Jack. He was supposed to be in Whitbourne for a couple of months. But he’d escaped, and for that the guards put him in the hole. And he was to stay in there until he learned his lesson. But he would not learn the lesson. The lesson was to give in to them. And he would not do it.
In the cell, a child of thirteen was left for days without human contact, except when he was passed a food tray in silence. And after a while he was left for months without anybody saying anything.
He would not learn the lesson, whatever it was.
Jury citation: “An indictment, a courageous testimony, and a call to change. Moore and Whalen give language to the violence hiding in plain sight.”
The Current32:31A child kept in solitary confinement for 730 days
As a teenager, Jack Whalen was held in solitary confinement for 730 days — beaten, humiliated and told he would amount to nothing at a notorious Newfoundland boys’ home. He’s sharing his fight for justice in the new book Invisible Prisons, written with the help of author Lisa Moore.
Everything and Nothing At All is an essay collection that discusses Jenny Heijun Wills’ quest for belonging as a transnational and transracial adoptee, a pansexual and polyamorous person and a parent with a life-long eating disorder. Drawing on her life experiences, she creates a vision of family — chosen, adopted and biological all at once.
“Creative writing has revealed to me that you don’t have to have a singular narrative,” said Wills in an interview on Bookends with Mattea Roach. “You don’t have to have a consistent character, that there are ways to live fluidly and to construct a version of yourself that doesn’t necessarily cow to these kinds of expectations that preexist us.”
There are ways to live fluidly and to construct a version of yourself that doesn’t necessarily cow to these kinds of expectations that preexist us.– Jenny Heijun Wills
Wills is a writer born in Seoul and raised in Southern Ontario. Her memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related won the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book. She currently lives in Winnipeg and teaches English at the University of Winnipeg.
From the book:
“You’re going to have swelling,” they warned at the surgical consultation when I was in my mid-twenties. “Your face will be double in size.” I nodded, smiling, as if it was no big deal. But inside I could already feel blood jackhammering in my ears, threatening my facade of nonchalance. I tried to calculate how I might negotiate leaving on my own, in a taxi, hiding in my apartment for a week so no one would see my fat, swollen face. I floated the idea to the technician. Uber didn’t exist back then and the bus would defeat the purpose of secreting myself away from public view. It didn’t matter, because my plan was immediately forbidden.
Jury citation: “These richly decorated and incisive essays are sometimes poignant, sometimes harrowing, and always rooted deeply in Wills’ lived experience.”
Bookends with Mattea Roach25:12Jenny Heijun Wills: Sharing her journey of transracial adoption and self-discovery in her moving essay collection
Everything and Nothing At All by Jenny Heijun Wills is an essay collection where the author reflects on her experiences as a transnational adoptee. Jenny was born in Korea and was adopted by a white Canadian family in southwestern Ontario when she was nine months old. Twenty years ago, she reconnected with her Korean birth family. She talks to Mattea Roach about this journey — which also inspired her prize-winning memoir, Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related — and about how writing and literature have helped her figure out who she is.
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