All Things Consoled: a daughter’s memoir has won the 2018 Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Nonfiction. On November 7th, in the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, seven literary awards were handed out by the Writers’ Trust, this one among them. You can watch the accompanying video here.
Jury Citation:
“Elizabeth Hay’s loving, exacting memoir, All Things Consoled, details the decline of her elderly parents with unflinching tenderness. The path she and her family travel is crooked and long, filled with hospital beds and doctors’ visits, foggy minds, and shuffling confusion. But Hay’s prose elevates this ordinary rite of passage — the death of one’s parents — to something rare and poetic. All Things Consoled becomes, itself, a consolation for anyone despairing at the loose ends that parents leave behind. Page-after-page this is a masterclass in observation — a lesson in how meaning can emerge from grief.”
Jurors: Joel Yanofsky, Donna Bailey Nurse, Michael Harris.