EVENT’s 2015 Non-Fiction Contest is open for submissions until April 15. You’ll have a shot at fame (and $1500 in prizes) for your stories. We’re consistently floored by the quality of work that shows up in our mailbox, and it can be hard to pick just 10 stories for the shortlist. The final decision, thankfully, isn’t ours to make. We pass that delightful burden on to our celebrity guest judge Andrew Westoll.

Andrew Westoll is an award-winning author, journalist and lecturer based in Toronto. His latest book, the national bestselling The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, is the biography of a family of chimpanzees who were rescued from a medical research laboratory and retired to an animal sanctuary on the south shore of Montreal. The Chimps won the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, was a finalist for several other major book awards and was named a book of the year by the Globe and Mail, Amazon.ca, Quill and Quire, and CTV’s Canada AM. Andrew is a Gold National Magazine Award winner, holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and recently joined the English faculty at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he teaches creative writing and literature. His debut novel is forthcoming (Winter 2016) from HarperCollins Canada.