Taras

Grescoe

Taras Grescoe won the 2008 Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize for Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood. On four other occasions, he has been a finalist for Writers’ Trust nonfiction prizes. His sixth and most recent work of nonfiction, Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World, was a finalist for the BC National Award for Creative Nonfiction and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction. This fall, he will publish Possess the Air: Fascism, Freedom, and the Fate of Mussolini’s Rome. He lives in Montreal.

Writers & Books

Award History

2012 - Finalist

Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

for Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile

Jury Citation

“Straphanger is a remarkable tour by bus, subway, and streetcar through some of the world’s most fascinating metropolises. Equal parts travel narrative, social history, and critique of urban planning, Grescoe’s writing unfolds with compelling subtlety. Straphanger takes the reader through clogged expressways and streamlined undergrounds, in sum a finely researched and nuanced argument in favour of high-quality public transit. In this book, the daily commute is not merely an unavoidable suburban phenomenon but a human experience in which transit is a key piece, utterly important to livable neighbourhoods in a post-automobile age.” – 2012 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (James Bartleman, Charlotte Gill, and Marni Jackson)