18 January 2006
John Terpstra Shortlisted for Charles Taylor Prize

Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that John Terpstra’s The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter (Gaspereau Press, 2005) has been shortlisted for the 2006 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. The jury announced the shortlist today in a press conference at the Windsor Arms in Toronto. Fellow nominees are James Chatto for The Greek for Love: A Memoir of Corfu (Random House Canada), Laura M. MacDonald for Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion 1917 (HarperCollins) and J.B. MacKinnon for Dead Man in Paradise (Douglas & McIntyre).

The Charles Taylor Prize, now in its fifth year, is presented annually in commemoration of Charles Taylor, one of Canada’s foremost essayists. The $25,000 prize is awarded to an author whose book demonstrates “an uncommon command of the English language, an elegance of style, and a subtlety of thought and perception.” The 2006 jurors – Laurier LaPierre, W.H. (Bill) New and Jan Walter – selected the finalists from 90 titles submitted by 31 publishers. This year’s winner will be announced in a ceremony to be held at the Windsor Arms in Toronto, 27 February 2006. For more information about the prize, please visit www.thecharlestaylorprize.ca

BACKGROUND
In The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter acclaimed author John Terpstra tells the story of his wife’s family and the short lives of her three brothers, each of whom lived with muscular dystrophy until their early twenties. With humour, reverence and great love, Terpstra charts the experience of a family under unusual, but resoundingly human, circumstances. The Boys honours the last year in the lives of three brothers – Neil, Paul and Eric – whose days could never rightly be called wasted or tragic, but whose time on earth was all too brief. Terpstra celebrates life and challenges the brackets we place around lives characterized by illness.

This book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Quadraat types and printed on Rolland Zephyr laid paper. The jacket features art by the author.

Gaspereau Press is a literary publisher and printer based in Kentville, Nova Scotia. The press is committed to literature and the book arts, incorporating a range of modern and antique forms of printing and binding to create books that are distinctive in manufacture and design. Its publications have won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the Alberta Book Award for fiction, and numerous Alcuin Awards for excellence in book design.

For more information contact
Beth Crosby at Gaspereau Press
47 Church Avenue, Kentville, NS, B4N 2M7
902-678-6002, info@gaspereau.com