Toronto writer Noah Richler is this year’s winner of the $25,000 British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for This is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada.

The book, based on a 10-part series Richler did for CBC Radio’s Ideas, is a “window onto Canadian writing in the present day,” the jury said.

Richler interviewed more than 100 Canadian writers and in the book reflects on the communities they represent. The Literary Atlas also makes a strong argument that literature matters.

Richler has pledged $5,000 of the award to native writers and/or the Downtown Eastside. He is still deciding specifically where the money will go.

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CBC Radio’s award-winning program Ideas has put its entire Markets and Society series online. You can now download the full, unrestricted MP3 files. Each episode runs about 53 minutes.
     Be sure to sign up to the Ideas podcast or listen Mondays to Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. local time on CBC Radio One, or at noon and 9:00 p.m. PT on Sirius 137.

Part 1: INTRODUCTION: A marketplace whose “laws” determine social possibilities is the dominant economic idea of our time. David Cayley explores the thought of Karl Polanyi, one of this idea’s greatest critics.
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Part 2: THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: The West, according to Karl Polanyi, was the first civilization to “disembed” the economy from society and let a self-regulating market dictate its social relations.
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Part 3: SOCIALISM AND FREEDOM: Karl Polanyi was a life-long socialist, but he opposed the tyranny and bureaucracy of Communism just as strongly as the rule of the market.
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Part 4: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TURN: Karl Polanyi highlighted the novelty of the modern West by exploring how earlier societies had contained and subordinated markets.
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Part 5: THE LEGACY: In the last twenty-five years, what Karl Polanyi called, “the stark utopia” of a global, self-regulating market has replaced and overwhelmed independent, national economies.
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