A biography about Sir John A. McDonald, covering the years 1815 to 1867, won the country’s foremost prize for true stories. Could you get any more Canadian than a book about the first Prime Minister?

Well, if it wasn’t for the subject of John A: The Man Who Made Us, all those sitting at today's Charles Taylor Prize For Literary Non-Fiction luncheon in the Sovererign Ballroom of Le Royal Meridien King Edward Hotel would actually be American, contends author Richard Gwyn.

Showing that it is indeed possible to grow into a bowl haircut, 73-year-old Toronto Star columnist Gwyn received a $25,000 award in the name of his late contemporary. Charles Taylor was a foreign correspondent and author, when he wasn’t breeding horses on the family farm — now site of the Canadian Film Centre — until he passed away in 1997. The prize was established a couple of years later to help commemorate the pursuit of excellence in the craft of writing.

The subjects of the five nominated books each year, if not the authors themselves, have tended to an older demographic since the first award was given out in 2000. A reflection of what the market is for occasionally esoteric topics, surely. Then again, Vancouver writer J.B. Mackinnon was in his mid-30s when he won in 2006 for Dead Man in Paradise, whose story of a nephew’s search for his uncle’s murder in the Dominican Republic evoked a mystery novel. (At least that’s what the Amazon.ca description says.)

Mackinnon credits the award with encouraging him to stay on course to write an even more successful book, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating. And he served as one of the three juror for this year’s Taylor prize, too, explaining from the podium how it took him approximately 48 hours to spend his winning bounty.

“There wasn’t much left after I bought drinks for friends and acquaintances,” he says, “and people who I didn’t know who were friends and acquaintances. But then my Finnish-Scottish heritage took over and I haven’t spent a penny since.”

Mackinnon must’ve needed the money, though, since he boasted of how it gave him liberty to relax and look inward for a while, advocating that whoever won this year ought to relish additional time with themselves “dancing in the moonlight.”

The short-listed books were culled from a crop of 137 eligible entrants, adding up to 65,760 pages of reading, sighs juror Charlotte Gray — herself most recently the author of a book on Alexander Graham Bell. Gray ploughed through one too many titles exploring “the wrath of a wretched childhood” along with “explosions of incredible egos” before settling on five worthwhiles.

A third juror, former Liberal MP John Manley, got through about 50 of those tomes before he was appointed to head a federal panel on Canada’s mission and future role in Afghanistan, so he took the rest on the road.

Such life-affirming anecdotes in the posh King Edward Hotel atmosphere contrast the generally grim experiences that feed most notable non-fiction books, to say nothing of the publishing industry’s struggle to get people to notice them.

Case in point, the other Charles Taylor prize nominees: Lost Genius: The Story of a Forgotten Musical Maverick by Kevin Bazzana, about composer Ervin Nyiregyházi, who went from child prodigy pianist to drunkard adult living in Los Angeles flophouses, prone to forgetting to dress himself even as he insisted being an aristocrat. Bazzana wrote an entire book about Nyiregyházi — a follow-up to his Glenn Gould book — upon discovering that “his life had no boring bits.”

The Film Club by David Gilmour was the easiest read of the five, a first-person account of how the local author felt he was too easily recognized from years of hosting arts shows on CBC Television to succumb to a real job — even though he really needed the money — and opted to spend a year teaching his delinquent teenage son life lessons through watching movies. Gilmour subsequently won the Governor General’s Literary Award for A Perfect Night to Go to China, so it’s safe to say he wrote himself out of that particular dark cloud.

The forever-rumpled Gilmour, resplendent in black T-shirt under pinstriped suit, tells the lunch crowd during his turn at the podium — part of the ceremony being broadcast on CBC Radio — about how he started writing novels about his love of women, and then after writing the same book four times, an agent suggested he write about his children instead. His son Jesse — granted a piece of the American rights to The Film Club in exchange for his input — just quit university after a year in favour of going to Vietnam instead to write a screenplay.

Ah, the folly of youth, something an event like this can always use a reminder of.

Sam Hiyate, who is Gilmour’s current literary agent, is easily recognized from his own years of media whoring on behalf of local indie Gutter Press. And, even at age 42, he claims to feel like a fish that fell in the wrong tank.

“This is what the publishing industry is, though,” he explains. “I’ve been in this 15 years, and there are always lots of middle-aged grey-haired men around, at every level. It was a lot of fun doing Gutter, and also Blood & Aphorisms magazine — a lot of people got laid at our parties — but the older you get, your aversion to risk-taking is bound to decrease. The trick seems to be to create something interesting enough to get accepted. That’s what Vincent Lam did, and how he won the Giller Prize when he was still in his early 30s.”

Gilmour’s book contains plenty of passages describing the agony of being an unemployed media personality in one’s mid-50s — maybe not a universal theme, but it set the stage for a post-divorce father-and-son bonding story that clicked, since the rights have been sold to nine other countries so far.

The two other Charles Taylor Prize nominees are probably a bit nearer in appeal to the typical CanLit audience who prefer struggle and strife with a female touch: From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People by noted poet Lorna Goodison and Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust by retired book publisher Anna Porter. Then again, as part of the weekend-long festivities leading up to the award ceremony, all five authors did readings at the Indigo store in the Eaton Centre — so how snobbish can these five writers really be?

Richard Gwyn prevails with the prize, however, living up to the Academy Awards theory that one can never go wrong by honouring the oldest person on the ballot.

And he looks quite grateful to have seen the industry tilt in his favour. While the best-known books exported from this country came from the likes of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Robertson Davies, he credits Naomi Klein’s No Logo and Margaret MacMillian’s Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World with helping to drive global appetites for a certain kind of book made in Canada.

In fact, out of the five books, Gwyn notes that his was the only one whose subject matter was essentially confined to Canada. So, he did the most Canadian thing of all — pledging to award part of his $25,000 for book awards in Newfoundland.

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