Jury Citation

“Born in the Peace River Country of northern Alberta, Candace Savage is the author of more than 20 books that define and extol the Prairie experience. Her seminal works of nonfiction include A Harvest to Reap: A History of Prairie Women (1976), Prairie, A Natural History (2011), and Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging (2019). Her subjects range from individual studies of crows, ravens, grizzly bears, and bees to the disconnecting impact of cultural migration. Savage has been lauded for her works of nonfiction and for her children’s writing, and she was described by The Globe and Mail as ‘an essential Canadian voice.’”

Jury Citation

“One day in late September of 2000, Candace Savage travels from her home in Saskatoon to Eastend, a village of 600 people on the eastern edge of the Cypress Hills. A two week vacation evolves into a decade-long fascination with the region and the writing of A Geography of Blood, a part-memoir, part history, part geological survey, part lament, part condemnation of the accepted myth of the settlement of the Western Plains, and above all, a haunting meditation on time and place.” – 2012 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (James Bartleman, Charlotte Gill, and Marni Jackson)