Charlotte Gill's Eating Dirt wins B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

Vancouver author Charlotte Gill has won the eighth annual British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. The announcement was made during a ceremony today at the Pan Pacific Vancouver hotel, hosted by B.C. premier Christy Clark and British Columbia Achievement chair Keith Mitchell.

Gill’s book Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, a memoir of the author’s gruelling years planting trees in B.C., was picked from a field that included Brian Fawcett’s Human Happiness, Andrew Westoll’s The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery, and Joel Yanofsky’s Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism.

The award comes with the weighty cash prize of $40,000, one of the largest in the country.