VANCOUVER — B.C. author Charlotte Gill won the 2012 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction on Monday for her memoir about tree planting Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe.

Gill was a tree planter for 17 years, first in Ontario, then in British Columbia; she estimates she has planted one million trees. Today, she teaches in the University of B.C.’s online creative writing program from her new home in Powell River, but she says she misses tree planting every day.

“All of my best friends were tree planters, my husband was a tree planter,” said Gill, who lived in Vancouver for 20 years. “There’s just something really incredible that happens in the backwoods when you get away from technology. It’s like going back 100 years.”

Her memoir details those relationships in a manner that jury member Paul Whitney said is “magical.”

“The prose in Eating Dirt is absolutely stunning; Gill is a wonderful writer,” Whitney said.

Whitney said he is very impressed with the wealth of non-fiction writing being published in Canada and that the high-quality of work written in this province makes him proud to be a British Columbian.

Gill said she is ecstatic to win the prize, and thanked her husband, who is a character in the book, as well as the support of her instructors at the University of B.C.’s creative writing program.

Other nominated authors were Brian Fawcett for Human Happiness, Andrew Westoll for The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery and Joel Yanofsky for Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism.

The members of the jury were Whitney, former city librarian at the Vancouver Public Library and now a consultant for publishing and public policy; Patricia Graham, former editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun and current vice-president of digital for Pacific Newspaper Group; and award-winning Canadian author and editor Shari Graydon.

The $40,000 prize was presented in Vancouver Monday by Premier Christy Clark and Keith Mitchell, chair of the British Columbia Achievement Foundation, which the province founded in 2003 to celebrate the arts.

Eating Dirt is published by Greystone, a division of Vancouver publisher Douglas & McIntyre, with the David Suzuki Foundation. It is also shortlisted for the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, to be presented March 5. Gill also wrote Ladykiller, a collection of short stories that was nominated for a Governor General’s literary award and won a B.C. Book Prize.

Sun Books Editor

tsherlock@vancouversun.com