Nice to see the Balsillie Prize for Public Policy presented by the Writers' Trust to veteran Toronto journalist and heritage and civic policy activist for his book
Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias. Good also to see the venerable small press Coach House getting the win along with its author.
Meanwhile the Cundill Prize in History was presented in Montreal last night to Tiya Miles for
All That She Carried: The Journal of Ashley's Sack, a history based on a small fragment of material culture and its testimony to the horrors of slavery. I'm doing a review of the Cundill shortlist and winner for the
Literary Review of Canada, so I won't say more, but this is an intensely vivid and moving book for a work of history, (by a Harvard prof, no less). Miles is the first Black winner of the Cundill, I believe.
