Saskatchewan Arts Board

Sask. writer wins $60,000 writers' prize

Saskatoon author Candace Savage has won this year's Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory From a Prairie Landscape.

The jury described A Geography of Blood as "a part memoir, part history, part geological survey, part lament, part condemnation of the accepted myth of the settlement of the Western Plains, and above all, a haunting meditation on time and place."

Savage’s need-to-know curiosity has inspired dozens of books and essays on the widest possible range of subjects, from the cosmic science of the aurora, to the inner workings of a beehive. Her latest book, A Geography of Blood, serves as an eccentric sequel to her classic, Prairie: A Natural History.

The recipient of several Saskatchewan Book Awards, she is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Savage was recently shortlisted for the 2012 Lieutenant Governor's Arts Award for Saskatchewan Artist. When she is not writing, she sings with Saskatoon's Choeur des Plaines and plays her squeezebox in the Saskatoon Fiddle Orchestra.

Savage has earned an international reputation for the charm and vitality of her thinking and her words. The author of more than two dozen books on an impressive breadth of subjects, she is a distinctive voice of western Canada, in conversation with the world.

For more on Candace Savage, visit www.candacesavage.ca.