For The First Time, The Finalists For This Prestigious Canadian Writing Prize Are All Women

In 2014, Slate asked the question, "is non-fiction the patriarch of literary genres?" The piece was a response to the overwhelmingly male list of authors chosen for the National Book Awards non-fiction contest long list. While progress has been made since then (Sigrid Nunez won last year’s), major literary awards including the Pulitzer, still have the tendency to disproportionately exclude women. The Writers’ Trust of Canada has done a better job of representing work by women authors, particularly when it comes to the Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction. (In 2014, the award went to Naomi Klein and there was only one man competing for the $60,000 prize; every year since, women have made up the majority of the list.) But there has never been an all-women shortlist — until now.
 
Judges sifted through 99 books from 55 publishers to determine the all-female finalists but "they didn’t consciously choose an all-women list. These were the books they deemed to be of the highest literary merit of the year’s non-fiction, and they happened to be women," a spokesperson for the prize told Refinery29.

Click through for the five writers who made the cut, and the informative and eye-opening Canadian books that you should add to your reading list ASAP.