The distinctly male point of view of Ian Brown’s Sixty is one of the book’s many charms.
Globe and Mail features writer Ian Brown is one of a dozen authors long-listed for the RBC Taylor Prize, it was announced Wednesday
Brown, who won the prize in 2010 for his memoir The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son, is this time nominated for his introspective and entertaining meditation on aging, Sixty: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?
The 12 nominees include two former winners of the Scotiabank Giller Prize: Austin Clarke for 'Membering – a chronicle of his childhood in Barbados, immigration to Canada in 1955 and subsequent writing career – and Will Ferguson for his travelogue Road Trip Rwanda: A Journey Into the New Heart of Africa.
Also on the long list is Rosemary Sullivan, who won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction in October for Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, a biography of the Russian dictator's lone daughter. The other biographers on the long list are David Halton for Dispatches from the Front: The Life of Matthew Halton, Canada's Voice at War and Siobhan Roberts for Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway.
Broadcaster Wab Kinew is nominated for The Reason You Walk, which doubles as a memoir and his father's life story, while novelist Camilla Gibb was recognized for her first book of non-fiction, This Is Happy, a memoir about family and what it means to be a parent.
The remaining nominees include Andrew Cohen for Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours that Made History; Ann Walmsley for The Prison Book Club; Michael Winter for Into the Blizzard: Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead; and Marius Kociejowski for Zoroaster's Children: And Other Travels.
The short list will be unveiled on Jan. 13, while the winner, who receives $25,000, will be announced in March.
This year's jury was originally composed of TV executive Susanne Boyce, Stephen J. Toope, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and Steven Galloway, a novelist and chair of the University of British Columbia's creative writing program. However, Galloway was abruptly suspended from his position at the school last month, pending an investigation into "serious allegations" against him headed by retired B.C. Supreme Court justice Mary Ellen Boyd, and has stepped down from the jury.
Replacing Galloway is Joseph Kertes, the novelist and former dean of creative and performing arts at Humber College in Toronto, who served on the jury in 2013.
The RBC Taylor Prize, formerly known as the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, was founded in honour of the author and former Globe and Mail correspondent. This year's award went to Plum Johnson for her memoir They Left Us Everything.