HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FINALISTS

Kamal Al-Solaylee, an assistant professor and undergraduate program director at the School of Journalism at Ryerson University, was previously a distinguished writer at the Globe and Mail. He has worked at Report on Business magazine and written features and reviews for the Toronto Star, National Post, The Walrus, Toronto Life, Chatelaine and several other publications. Al-Solaylee holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham and has taught at the University of Waterloo and York University. Al-Solaylee’s Intolerable is part memoir of an Arab family caught in the turmoil of Middle Eastern politics over six decades, part personal coming-out narrative and part cultural analysis.

Modris Eksteins is professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto. His bestselling Rites of Spring was published in nine countries and won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Walking Since Daybreak was also a national bestseller and won the Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize. Eksteins presents Solar Dance, which takes us from the eve of the First World War through the rise of Hitler and the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present, using the cult of celebrity that first grew up around Vincent van Gogh.

Rachel Giese is a senior editor at The Walrus. Formerly, she was a columnist for the Toronto Star, a writer and editor at CBC.ca’s Arts Online, a senior editor at Chatelaine and a journalism instructor at Ryerson University.

Taras Grescoe is the author of five books including the bestselling Bottomfeeder, which won the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction. Two other titles, Sacré Blues and The End of Elsewhere, were shortlisted for Writers’ Trust awards. His work has appeared in a variety of major publications including The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Gourmet, Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic and more. He lives in Montreal. Grescoe’s Straphanger offers a global tour of alternatives to car-based living.

JJ Lee is the menswear columnist for the Vancouver Sun and broadcasts a weekly fashion column for CBC Radio in Vancouver. He spent a year as an apprentice at Modernize Tailors and was featured in the award-winning film about the shop, Tailor Made: The Last Tailor Shop in Chinatown. In 2007, he wrote and presented an hour-length radio documentary on the social history of suits, entitled The Measure of Man, for CBC Radio's Ideas. Lee lives in New Westminster, where he works as a creative consultant for a design firm. Part personal memoir, part social history, The Measure of a Man follows Lee’s decision to finally make his father’s last suit his own.

Candace Savage is the author of more than two dozen books, including Prairie: A Natural History, which was named Book of the Year at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. In A Geography of Blood Savage immerses herself deeply in the dark history of her beloved prairie landscape to produce a story of cruelty and survival of our indigenous peoples.