VANCOUVER – Charlotte Gill has won the $ 40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for her heralded memoir on tree planting.
“Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe” nabbed the annual prize on Monday at a ceremony in Vancouver.
The book, which focuses on trees and deforestation, was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize and the Charles Taylor Prize.
In a news release, the jury of the B.C. award said 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.”
“Eating Dirt” beat out three other finalists for the B.C. award: “Human Happiness” by Brian Fawcett; “The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery” by Andrew Westoll; and Joel Yanofsky’s “Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism.”
Gill, a former tree planter herself, was a finalist for the 2005 Governor General’s Literary Award and winner of the B.C. Book Prize for fiction for her previous title, “Ladykiller.”
A resident of B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, she’s also had work published in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Stories, and various magazines.
The B.C. non-fiction award was founded in 2004.
This year’s jury members — Paul Whitney, Patricia Graham and Shari Graydon — sorted through 134 nominated books to pick the finalists.
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