I’m delighted to share the news that Carol Shaben has won the 2013 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction for her book Into the Abyss: How a Deadly Plane Crash Changed the Lives of a Pilot, a Politician, a Criminal and a Cop. It’s a gripping and engaging book. Here’s we judges had to say about it:

In Into the Abyss, Carol Shaben reconstructs a 1984 commuter plane crash in northern Alberta that killed six passengers and wounded four others—including Shaben’s father, a prominent cabinet minister. After watching how the accident affected her father for many years, Shaben, a former CBC writer and broadcaster, decided to find out more about it. While the story is an expertly researched, detailed reconstruction of the crash and a call for better oversight of small, commuter airlines, its heart lies in the portraits she draws of the crash’s survivors: her father, the pilot, and an RCMP officer and the prisoner he was transporting. Through interviews and written documents, Shaben paints a haunting portrait of the bond created among the survivors and how the crash affected their lives.

I highly recommend the book and look forward to meeting Carol at the awards ceremony at Wilfrid Laurier University in November.