On November 21, 2019, the Charles Taylor Foundation announced that it would bring the RBC Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction to a close with the final awarding in March 2, 2020. Read on for a statement from our publisher, Rob Sanders:
All of us at Greystone Books are saddened to learn that next year will mark the end of the RBC Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction. This prize has been an important part of the Canadian literary landscape for the past twenty years, and it has provided significant encouragement and exposure for the writing and publication of Canadian English literary non-fiction during that period. We salute the vision of Noreen and Charles Taylor who founded the prize in the beginning. But we are very disappointed to see it go. Literary awards are far more than a cash prize for the winning writer, which is of course a very good thing when so many writers are woefully underpaid. But the very existence of the prize itself becomes part of the important literary fibre of a culture. The disappearance of any prize serves to weaken that fibre, and this is certainly the case now that the RBC Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction will cease to be.
—Rob Sanders
Publisher, Greystone Books