Margaret Atwood, Coral Ann Howells, Peter Theroux to jury 2020 RBC Taylor Prize
Fresh off her 2019 Booker Prize win for The Testaments, Margaret Atwood has been announced as one of the three jurors for the 2020 RBC Taylor Prize.
The annual $25,000 award recognizes the year's best Canadian nonfiction book.
Atwood's fellow jurors are British professor Coral Ann Howells and American translator Peter Theroux.
Atwood is one of Canada's most celebrated writers, having written over 50 books of fiction, poetry, essays and graphic novels. She recently released The Testaments, the sequel to her award-winning 1985 book The Handmaid's Tale. It shared the 2019 Booker Prize with British author Bernardine Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, Other.
Howells lives in London and is a specialist in English-Canadian literature. She co-edited both The Oxford History of the Novel in English and The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature.
Theroux has translated many works of fiction by Egyptian, Iraqi, Israeli and Lebanese writers, including Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz's Children of the Alley. He also translated the first Saudi Arabian and Nubian novels into English: Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif and Dongola by Idris Ali.
The jury will read over 130 books and curate a longlist by Dec. 4, 2019. The shortlist will be announced on Jan. 8, 2020, followed by the winner on March 2, 2020.
Kate Harris won the prize in 2018 for her travel memoir Lands of Lost Borders.
Other past winners include Carol Shields for her biography Jane Austen: A Life, Ian Brown for The Boy in the Moon and Thomas King for The Inconvenient Indian.