On Feb. 21, Thomas King was awarded the 2014 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-fiction for his work of narrative history, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Doubleday Canada).

The jury, comprised of Globe and Mail books editor Jared Bland, Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham, and author/publisher Anna Porter, cited The Inconvenient Indian as a “wry, iconoclastic, and important book that challenges us to think differently about both the past and the future.”

The book was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Prize for Non-fiction, awarded to Graeme Smith in October, and is among the contenders for the $25,000 RBC Taylor Prize, to be announced next month.

King was presented with the $40,000 prize at a ceremony in Vancouver. The five finalists, who received $2,500 each, were Carolyn Abraham for The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, Legend and the Genes that Bind Us (Random House Canada); J. B. MacKinnon for The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be (Random House Canada); Margaret MacMillan for The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Allen Lane Canada); and Graeme Smith for The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (Knopf Canada).