"Classic- a book which people praise and don't read."
The winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
will be named on Monday, February 8 at a gala luncheon in Toronto. The
award honours the late Charles Taylor, a noted journalist and author
who passed away in 1997. It was founded in 1998 and first awarded in
2000; past winners include Carol Shields and Rudy Wiebe.
The Afterword asked the four nominees to discuss their greatest influences, the state of long-form journalism, and Twitter.
Nominee: John English, author of Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000 (Knopf Canada)
Q: In this era of brevity, where Twitter and text messages are
the norm, what is the role of long-form journalism and creative
non-fiction?
A: Age of brevity and impact on long form journalism and creative fiction: On the one hand, there is twitter but, on the other hand, there is Kindle and its new Apple competitor. Those devices an overdue response by the book and the longer article to the brevity of twitter and emails, which so often trivialize. The problems we face are not trivial; their answers will require longer forms and creativity.
That said, describe your book in 140 characters.
Just Watch Me is a biography of Pierre Trudeau as a politician whose character shaped Canada's circumstances in his own time and beyond. Trudeau failed in his marriage, divided Canadians, mishandled the economy but saved his country.
Name one non-fiction book that had an influence on your own career. Why that book?
William Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism. As an undergraduate, I read this 1935 book on the struggle for empires and how economics and race thinking drove the participants. It turned me away from law and political science towards history as a profession.
What’s your dream non-fiction project? Why haven’t you written it yet?
I would like to write a book on Canada without an empire to shield it. For the last five hundred years, we have sheltered under the greatest empire of the day: the French until 1763; the British until 1945; and the Americans since then. If this is Asia's century, we will have no shield.
Writing was developed independently in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and among the Maya in Central America. There are some areas where the question as to whether writing was adopted or independently developed is in doubt, as at Easter Island.