J.B. MacKinnon was a two-time winner of the National Magazine Foundation Gold Award for travel writing before he published his first book, Dead Man in Paradise (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), a memoir of travelling to the Dominican Republic to investigate the suspicious murder of an uncle he never knew, Canadian Catholic priest Arturo MacKinnon, who was shot by a soldier in 1965. It received the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for The Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize in 2006 and the second annual British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction in 2006.

With his partner and co-writer Alisa Smith, J.B. MacKinnon co-authored the trendy but not exactly gripping account of their year-long attempt to eat only foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver apartment. The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (Random House 2007) received the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and led to another much-noticed release.

MacKinnon vaulted higher into the upper-echelon on B.C. non-fiction writers with The Once and Future World (Random House 2013), one of five titles shortlisted for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction in 2014.

BOOKS:

Dead Man in Paradise (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005)

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (Random House 2007).

The Once and Future World (Random House 2013) 978-0-307-36218-6, $29.95

[BCBW 2014] "Travel" "Environment"