Top Notch Cdn non-fiction

The British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction was launched in 2005 to honour Canada’s finest writers of non-fiction and to celebrate a genre that stimulates our national conversation and shares knowledge about the complex world in which we live.

The award recognizes and honours fine Canadian writing in the field of non-fiction. The genre includes essays, memoirs, criticism, history, literary journalism, and biography, among other forms.

This year's esteemed winner is:

Solar Dance : genius, forgery, and the crisis of truth in the modern age (M)
by Modris Eksteins

"The jury cited Solar Dance as a "fascinating work of cultural history, and a provocative analysis of the roots of the modern era as it developed in the social and political turmoil of the early 20th century".

"In Solar Dance, acclaimed writer and scholar Modris Eksteins uses Vincent van Gogh as his lens for this brilliant survey of Western culture and politics in the last century. The long-awaited follow-up to Modris Eksteins' internationally acclaimed Rites of Spring and Walking Since Daybreak. Now he has produced another thrilling, iconoclastic work of cultural history that is a trailblazing biography of an era--from the eve of the First World War and the rise of Hitler to the fall of the Berlin Wall--that illuminates our current world, with its cults of celebrity and the crisis of the authentic. Solar Dance is a penetrating examination of legitimacy and truth, fakery and pretence--highly relevant to all of us today." - Publisher

Also for your consideration, the three runner-ups:

A Geography of Blood: unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape (M) by Candace Savage

A Season in Hell: my 130 days in the Sahara with Al Qaeda (M) by Robert R. Fowler

Pinboy: a memoir (M) by George Bowering