Prize Watch: The Dafoe Prize

The J.W Dafoe Book Prize, presented by the Dafoe Foundation that honours the crusading twentieth-century journalist John W. Dafoe, announced a long list of ten books on Bluesky today. It's for "the best book on Canada, Canadians, and/or Canada’s place in the world published in the previous calendar year."

I like shortlists better (isn't three usually enough?) but I suspect no writer agrees with me. And there's some good history and some good friends on this long one, so why not?  Here's the list.

Short list of five to come on September 25. Winner October 14. The fall book prize season is underway. 

Crystal Gail Fraser’s By Strength, We Are Still Here

Jody Wilson-Raybould and Roshan Danesh’s Reconciling History: A Story of Canada

Raymond B. Blake’s Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity

Asa McKercher and Michael D. Stevenson’s Building a Special Relationship: Canada-US Relations in the Eisenhower Era, 1953–61

M.G. Vassanji’s Nowhere, Exactly

Gerald Friesen’s The Honourable John Norquay

Ken McGoogan’s Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship

Mark Bourrie’s Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia

Tim Martin’s Unwinnable Peace: Untold Stories of Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan

Niigaan Sinclair’s Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre