Karyn L. Freedman Wins the 2015 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA(Marketwired - Feb. 13, 2015) -

Editor's note: There is one photo associated with this press release.

British Columbia Achievement chair Keith Mitchell is pleased to announce that Karyn L. Freedman has won the 2015 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for "One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery".

Freedman was presented with the $40,000 prize by Hon. Peter Fassbender. BC's Minister of Education at a ceremony that also celebrated finalists Chantal Hébert with Jean Lapierre for The Morning After: The Quebec Referendum and The Day That Almost Was; Alison Pick for Between Gods: A Memoir; and James Raffan for Circling the Midnight Sun: Culture and Change in the Invisible Arctic.

Now in its eleventh year, British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction is one of Canada's major national book prizes and the only one to originate in B.C. The annual award is presented by the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, an independent foundation established by the Province in 2003 to celebrate excellence in the arts, humanities, enterprise, and community service.

"It's now been over a decade that the British Columbia Achievement Foundation's National Book Award has honoured Canada's foremost non-fiction writers," said chair Keith Mitchell. "The 2015 finalists join a truly impressive group of writers recognized by the BC National Award program over time. Congratulations to Karyn Freedman and to all the finalists."

The 2015 jury panel members for the BC National Award were: Jared Bland the arts editor at The Globe and Mail and previously a senior editor at House of Anansi; John Fraser, a journalist and writer who served as master of Massey College from 1995 to 2014; and Anne Giardini, writer, director, lawyer and executive, and the Chancellor of Simon Fraser University.

The jury cited One Hour in Paris as a "book about rape, but, more than that, it's a book about our collective failure to address the ways in which sexual violence shames and silences its victims and taints our society as a whole."

Background information about British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction is available at http://www.bcachievement.com/nonfiction.

Detailed information about the awards and a list of past winners is posted on the foundation's website at www.bcachievement.com.

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