Karyn L. Freedman has won this year’s B.C. Award (photo: Regina Garcia)

The British Columbia Achievement Foundation and B.C. Minister of Education Peter Fassbender presented Toronto writer Karyn L. Freedman with the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction for One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery (Freehand Books) at a ceremony in Vancouver Feb. 13.

The ceremony also honoured finalists Chantal Hébert and Jean Lapierre for The Morning After: The 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Day That Almost Was (Knopf Canada), Alison Pick for Between Gods: A Memoir (Doubleday Canada), and James Raffan for Circling the Midnight Sun: Culture and Change in the Invisible Arctic (HarperCollins) with $2,500 each.

This year’s jury comprised Globe and Mail arts editor Jared Bland, journalist and writer John Fraser, and Simon Fraser University chancellor and writer-director Anne Giardini.

In a press release, the jury lauded 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.”