Journalist Ian Brown won the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction Monday for his touching book about his child's rare genetic mutation.

IBNA: According to Canadian Press, "The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son" profiles 13-year-old Walker, who has cardio-facio-cutaneous (CFC) and is frail, mentally delayed and unable to communicate.

"I wrote this book because Walker can't speak," Brown said in his acceptance speech as his wife and fellow Globe and Mail journalist, Johanna Schneller, who is Walker's mother, looked on with tears in her eyes.

"I would like to thank you for Walker's sake and say Walker would appreciate this, but obviously I don't know that - it's all speculation - but I do know that if Walker was here right now ... he would be very, very, very happy to be here. He would convey that to you."

Brown first wrote about Walker as part of a series for the Globe and later turned the stories into a book that recently won B.C.'s $40,000 National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

Since the book was published, Brown has received regular emails from families of loved ones afflicted with CFC around the world, he said.

"We all feel like we have a kind of community," said Brown, anchor of TVO's documentary series "Human Edge" and "The View From Here."

"That's the thing about a severe intellectual disability, it's isolating ... and so this is a way to be less lonely."

Schneller said Walker has a generous spirit and wouldn't mind sharing his story with the world.

"The world is a wide, open book to Walker on some level," she said. "He's discovering it anew every single day, and I really don't think that he would object to being the subject of a story."

Three other authors were in the running for the Charles Taylor Prize, established in 1998 by Noreen Taylor in honour of her late journalist husband.

University of Waterloo professor John English made the short list for "Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000."

Montreal author and literary translator Daniel Poliquin was in the running for "Rene Levesque."

And Kenneth Whyte, the publisher and editor of Maclean's magazine, was a finalist for "The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst."

The three runners-up each receive $2,000.

The four finalists were selected from a crop of 125 Canadian titles by jurors Andrew Cohen, Sheila Fischman and Tim Cook, who won the prize last year.

Brown said he was grateful for having such a prize in a world where "narrative non-fiction is being ignored these days in favour of faster, more frequent, shorter blurts of information."
"I think narrative non-fiction will come back, and this prize keeps it there."

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