Eating Dirt

Winner of the BC National Award for Canadian Non-FictionWinner of the 2012 Foreword Magazine Editor’s Choice Prize NonfictionShortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Prize for NonfictionShortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction“This is a deeply researched, beautifully written book.”—Emily St. John Mandel“In prose that is at once lyrical, nuanced, and sharp-edged, Gill examines a trade and a way of life.”—Maclean’s“Gill’s is a book you can live in. You come to speak its language and to feel as she feels.”—Globe and Mail“Charlotte Gill cuts to the bone with words so taut and commanding they expose the toughness required to march through life in the forestry business.”—Foreword Magazine“An arresting look into another world. …What sets “Eating Dirt” apart is the vividness of the writing. Gill’s prose puts the wasp in your shirt, the weariness in you at the cellular level, the grizzly too close for comfort.”—Seattle Times“Never have I read such a beautiful book with such a dull premise: what it’s like to plant tree seedlings in the wake of logging companies’ destruction. …Gill turns a subject that might seem narrow and confined into a lyrical essay about labor and rest, decay and growth.”—Smithsonian Magazine“Charlotte Gill gets my enthusiastic vote as the best nonfiction book of 2012. …highly readable …Gill’s narrative is by turns gripping, funny, informative but always tactile.”—John Sledge, Alabama Press Register“The humility that lies in the title of Charlotte Gill’s extraordinary Eating Dirt is more than borne out in this astonishing chronicle of work, the elements, and place. …Charlotte Gill writes with a dexterity and nobility that soars. This is the best book, on several fronts, that I’ve read in a long time.”—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company“The trees they plant each year “shimmy in the wind. There, we say. We did this with our hands. We didn’t make millions, and we didn’t cure AIDS. But at least a thousand new trees are breathing.” For that, she can be proud—and it makes for a good story.”—Publishers Weekly“An inspired narrative in a unique topic that is half memoir, half magic. …A radiant piece of non-fiction by a talented writer, whose descriptions will make your back ache by the time you finish reading.”—Sacramento Book Review, 5 stars“In language as sharp as obsidian, as unsentimental as a clear-cut, Charlotte Gill tells the story of her tree-planting tribe, men and women who spend their lives atoning for the deeds of the rest of us who, to this day, continue to sacrifice the greatest temperate rainforest on earth on the altar of our prosperity.”—Wade Davis“Charlotte Gill is everything you could want from a storyteller: honest and wise, leanly lyrical, tough and tender in equal measure. In this exquisite book about a gnarly occupation, we come to appreciate the resilience of nature and humans both.”—Philip Connors, author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

Charlotte Gill was born in London and raised in Canada and the United States. Her book Eating Dirt was a national bestseller that won the B.C. National Award for Canadian Nonfiction and was also shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize and the RBC Taylor Prize. She is also the author of Almost Brown, a mixed-race family memoir, and Ladykiller, which was a Governor General’s Award nominee. She lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada.