Jury Citation

“From it’s first page, Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe takes the reader on a fast-paced journey through a season of tree-planting the clear-cuts of Canada’s west coast. Part memoir, part study of the intense beauty of some of the world’s oldest growth forests and our relationship to them as human beings, it is Charlotte Gill’s electric use of language that makes her twenty-years of experience come to vivid life. Eating Dirt not only takes us through the rough daily cycles of Gill’s unusual labor as a member of the ‘tree-planting tribe’ – ‘we fall out of bed and into our rags, still crusted with the grime of yesterday’ – but into a world rarely seen and beautifully wrought.” – 2011 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (Brian Brett, Devyani Saltzman, and Russell Wangersky)