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Candace
Savage

Candace Savage is the author of more than two dozen books including A Geography of Blood, which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and Prairie: a Natural History, which won the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 1994 was inducted into the Honor Roll of the Rachel Carson Institute, Chatham College, in Pittsburgh. A fiddler, chorister, and chair of the NatureCity Festival, Savage shares her time between Eastend and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Award History

Selection Committee Citation

“Born in the Peace River Country of northern Alberta, Candace Savage is the author of more than 20 books that define and extol the Prairie experience. Her seminal works of nonfiction include A Harvest to Reap: A History of Prairie Women (1976), Prairie, A Natural History (2011), and Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging (2019). Her subjects range from individual studies of crows, ravens, grizzly bears, and bees to the disconnecting impact of cultural migration. Savage has been lauded for her works of nonfiction and for her children’s writing, and she was described by The Globe and Mail as ‘an essential Canadian voice.’”

2012 Winner

Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
for A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape

Jury Citation

“One day in late September of 2000, Candace Savage travels from her home in Saskatoon to Eastend, a village of 600 people on the eastern edge of the Cypress Hills. A two week vacation evolves into a decade-long fascination with the region and the writing of A Geography of Blood, 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.” – 2012 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (James Bartleman, Charlotte Gill, and Marni Jackson)

Program History

2023 Selector

Rising Stars

Selection