Rosemary Sullivan (photo: Tom Sandler)

Toronto author Rosemary Sullivan has been recognized with this year’s RBC Taylor Prize for Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Sveltana Alliluyeva (HarperCollins Canada). Sullivan was presented with the $25,000 literary non-fiction award on March 7 at the Omni King Edward Hotel in Toronto.

Sullivan, who previously won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-fiction for her biography, dedicated the prize to Alliluyeva’s daughter, Chrese Evans, whom she described as a funky Portlandian and Obama supporter. “May Stalin roll in his grave,” she said.

The winner was selected by jurors Joseph Kertes, Susanne Boyce, and Stephen J. Toope. Finalists Ian Brown (Sixty), Camilla Gibb (This is Happy), David Halton (Dispatches from the Front), and Wab Kinew (The Reason You Walk) each received a $2,000 purse.