Kate Harris’s Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road has won this year’s RBC Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. Harris says she was always fascinated with the tales of Marco Polo and wanted to follow his footsteps in her debut work, which was published by Knopf Canada.
Jurors Camilla Gibb, Roy MacGregor and former Supreme Court chief justice Beverley McLachlin read nearly every non-fiction book published in Canada in the past year, 110 of them. As juror and author Gibb says, “It’s a book club for masochists. ... All of us cared deeply about the narrative and that led us to our conclusion."
In Harris’s acceptance speech, she said that “asking questions about the world around us every day is what I want to do. And as writer Simone Weil said ‘Attention is a form of prayer’ and I feel that sincerely.”