Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt nominated for the 2012 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

Greystone Books is delighted to announce that Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt has been nominated for the 2012 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

The Award is presented by the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, an independent foundation that was established and endowed by the Province of BC in 2003 to celebrate excellence and achievement in the arts, humanities, enterprise, and community service.

The 2012 shortlist was announced by Keith Mitchell, chair of the BC Achievement Foundation. “This award is British Columbia's opportunity to highlight the important contribution Canada's best non-fiction makes to our national conversation,” said Mitchell. “We thank the jury for its diligence in selecting this outstanding shortlist from the field of 134 books nominated for this year’s prize.”

The shortlist was chosen by jury members Paul Whitney, who retired from his position as City Librarian at Vancouver Public Library in 2010; Patricia Graham, the former editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun and current Vice President, Digital, for Pacific Newspaper Group; and award-winning author and editor Shari Graydon. The jury will announce the winner of the 2012 prize at a special presentation ceremony in Vancouver in February, 2012. The winning author will receive $40,000 while the remaining finalists will each receive $2,500.

Eating Dirt is described in the following citation from the jury: “Charlotte Gill delivers an insider's perspective on the grueling, remote and largely ignored world of that uniquely modern-day ‘tribe’, the tree planter. In the process, she enlivens the boom and bust history of logging and its environmental impact, questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace complex ecosystems of naturally evolving old growth forests. Gill's astonishingly lucid prose evokes a visceral experience of the frequently wet, often dangerous, yet surprisingly exhilarating hard labour of those working to mitigate the clear-cut collision between human beings and nature. And although by the end of each tightly crafted chapter, you're desperate for your own 2,000-calorie meal, hot shower and insect-free bed, you're compelled to read on. She writes the forest like Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven painted it: bringing it vividly to life in all its mythic grandeur with striking details and evocative analogies, using intelligence, verve and humour to illuminate the dangers that live within, and threaten from without.”