National Magazine Award-winning writer Andrew Westoll has won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, an honour and $25,000 cash prize awarded at a ceremony in Toronto yesterday.
Andrew was tabbed for his 2011 book The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, which depicts the lives of former research primates who are now retired in a Quebec animal sanctuary.
Quoted the judges:
“Westoll deftly draws the reader into the wild day-to-day ride of life with the Fauna chimps and soon their ‘otherness’ falls away.”
Andrew was the winner of a 2007 National Magazine Award for Travel writing in explore magazine, work that paved the way to his first book, The Riverbones. As the winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, Andrew joins the company of such writers as Wayne Johnston, Carol Shields, J.B. MacKinnon, Ian Brown, Charles Foran and others.
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NMA winners among Charles Taylor Prize finalists
