2023: Hilary Peach, Thick Skin

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Description

For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder – and one of the only women — in the Boilermakers Union. Distilled from a vast cache of journals, notes, and keen observations, Thick Skin follows Peach from the West Coast shipyards and pulp mills of British Columbia, through the Alberta tar sands and the Ontario rust belt, to the colossal power generating stations of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. At times edging up to the surreal, Thick Skin is a collection of strange stories carefully told, in tenderness and ferocity, for anyone who has spent time in a trade, or is curious about the unseen world of industrial construction.

Judges' Comments

“I love a book that surprises me, and in this case, I was very surprised by how engrossed I became in the life of an itinerant boilermaker,” said Bruce Gillespie, an award juror and associate professor in the User Experience Design program at Laurier’s Brantford campus. “That the book is so engaging is a testament to Peach’s skill as an author. She gives us unrestricted access to dangerous, high-stress workplaces that we would otherwise never see for ourselves and shows us the challenges that women face there to be taken seriously and treated as equals.”

Listen

Listen to the talk Peach delivered at her award ceremony, which was recorded and broadcast by CBC Radio's Ideas in an episode entitled, "Why are women still outsiders in the trades?"

• CBC Radio One: Ideas "An Outsider Inside the Trades"

Learn More

• Publisher: Anvil Press
• Website: anvilpress.com/books/thick-skin-field-notes-from-a-sister-in-the-brotherhood

Explore the works of our previous Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction winners.