Last January 18, I was reflecting on the predominance over the years of fiction writers and fiction critics on the juries of the Charles Taylor Prize in Literary Non-fiction and what seemed to follow from that: the predominance of novelists among the winners.
The jury makeup was changing then, and the 2007 jury, recently announced, has solid non-fiction cred. It's past winner J.B. Mackinnon, Charlotte Gray, and former politician John Manley. Manley reflects the trend among high-end prizes to leaven their juries with non-writer celebrity jurors -- not a bad thing if they are literate readers, I'd say.
