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| The Cundill finalists for 2024 |
The Canada Council has announced the shortlists for its Governor-General's Literary Awards. The nonfiction list is... mixed. Heavy on memoir and strong in indigenous context, it has a couple of issue- oriented books, though nothing that would count as history (again).
[Update, October 10: A friend of the blog writes:
I caught your blog post and laughed out loud at this line: “…it has a couple of issue- oriented books, though nothing that would count as history (again).”
It’s sooo discouraging.
It’s a bit different on the French side, and I’m not sure why. Different juries, I guess.]
Strangely, the GGbooks website presents cover photos of the nominated titles, but no description or jury statements about why they were nominated, nothing about the authors at all, no links. Three PenguinRandom titles, two from indie Canadian presses. On a quick glance, Winipek and The Age of Insecurity (the 2023 Massey Lectures) look substantial, but it's a literary prize: here's hoping the jurors have been assessing on that basis.
Two of the books use that lazy trope "the age of ....[fill in the blank]" but that might be on the publishers. Congratulations to all the nominees,
- Danny Ramadan, Crooked Teeth: A Gay Syrian Refugee Memoir
- Helen Knott, Becoming a Matriarch
- Petra Molnar, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Surveillance
- Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart
- Nigaan Sinclair, Winipek: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre
Over to the Cundill History Prize which announced its three finalists recently. Looks like a list of big serious straight-up history books this year -- a good thing for that neglected category! Three American nominees for a global prize, however.
Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass – A landmark history of the post-World War II trials of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, which has shaped relationships throughout modern Asia.
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal – A sweeping 1000-year history of the power of Indigenous North America, from ancient cities to fights for sovereignty that continue today.
Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan C. Penningroth – Stretching from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system, to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life.
