University of Toronto emeritus historian Modris Eksteins has won the $40,000 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-fiction for Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age (Knopf Canada).

The jury, comprised of retired librarian Paul Whitney, former Globe and Mail books editor Martin Levin, and publishing veteran Jan Whitford, called Solar Dance a “fascinating work of cultural history, and a provocative analysis of the roots of the modern era as it developed in the social and political turmoil of the early 20th century.”

Solar Dance, which was nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction, beat that award’s winner, Candace Savage’s A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape (Greystone Books). George Bowering’s Pinboy (Cormorant Books) and Robert Fowler’s A Season in Hell: My 130 Days in the Sahara with Al Qaeda (HarperCollins Canada) were also finalists.