Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
Annual Canadian literary prize
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The Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction is a Canadian literary award, presented annually by the Writers' Trust of Canada to the best work of non-fiction by a Canadian writer.
TypeLiterary
AwardedforCanadian nonfiction
SponsoredbyHilary Weston
Viacom (former)
Pearson Canada (former)
Nereus Financial (former)
Viacom (former)
Pearson Canada (former)
Nereus Financial (former)
CountryCanada
| Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction | |
|---|---|
| Type | Literary |
| Awarded for | Canadian nonfiction |
| Sponsored by | Hilary Weston Viacom (former) Pearson Canada (former) Nereus Financial (former) |
| Country | Canada |
| Rewards | CA$60,000 (winner) CA$5,000 (finalists) |
| Currently held by | Martha Baillie for There Is No Blue |
Sponsorship history
First established in 1997, the award's original corporate sponsor was Viacom. Pearson Canada, the regional branch of an educational book publishing company, took over the award in 1999, and Nereus Financial, a stock brokerage, became the sponsor from 2006 to 2008. After Nereus dropped its sponsorship, the award had no corporate sponsor until 2011,[1] when Hilary Weston (a philanthropist and former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario) was announced as the award's new sponsor.[2]
Canada's most lucrative non-fiction prize, the winner receives a cash sum of CA$60,000 and all finalists receive CA$5,000.[2][3] Prior to Weston's patronage of the award, the prize would consist CA$15,000 for the winner and CA$2,000 for the finalists.
Nominees and winners
| Year | Author | Title | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1997 | Ernest Hillen | Small Mercies: A Boy After War | Winner | [4] |
| Charlotte Gray | Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King | Finalist | [5] | |
| John Bentley Mays | Power in the Blood: Land, Memory, and a Southern Family | |||
| Ruth Teichroeb | Flowers on My Grave | |||
| Eileen Whitfield | Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood | |||
| 1998 | Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson | Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman | Winner | [6] |
| Michael Ignatieff | Isaiah Berlin: A Life | Finalist | [7] | |
| David Manicom | Progeny of Ghosts: Travels in Russia and the Old Empire | |||
| Linda Spalding | The Follow | |||
| Charles Wilkins | The Circus at the Edge of the Earth | |||
| 1999 | Modris Eksteins | Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II and the Heart of our Century | Winner | [8] |
| Robert Bringhurst | Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World | Finalist | [9] | |
| Jacalyn Duffin | History of Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction | |||
| Moira Farr | After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor's Tale | |||
| Wayne Johnston | Baltimore's Mansion: A Memoir | |||
| 2000 | Erna Paris | Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History | Winner | [10] |
| Donald Harman Akenson | Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus | Finalist | [11] | |
| Hugh Brody | The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World | |||
| Taras Grescoe | Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec | |||
| John Stackhouse | Out of Poverty: And into Something More Comfortable | |||
| 2001 | Clark Blaise | Time Lord | Winner | [12] |
| Kevin Major | As Near to Heaven by Sea | Finalist | [13] | |
| Heather Pringle | The Mummy Congress | |||
| Carol Shields | Jane Austen | |||
| Jack Todd | The Taste of Metal: A Deserter’s Story | |||
| 2002 | Jake MacDonald | Houseboat Chronicles: Notes from a Life in Shield Country | Winner | [14] |
| Katherine Ashenburg | The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die | Finalist | [15] | |
| Andrew Clark | Keen Soldier: The Execution of Second World War Private Harold Pringle | |||
| Marni Jackson | Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign | |||
| Lorie Miseck | Promise of Salt | |||
| 2003 | Brian Fawcett | Virtual Clearcut, or The Way Things Are in My Hometown | Winner | [16] |
| Mark Abley | Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages | Finalist | [17] | |
| J. Edward Chamberlin | If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground | |||
| Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle | Sahara: A Natural History | |||
| Taras Grescoe | The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists | |||
| 2004 | Elaine Dewar | The Second Tree: Of Clones, Chimeras, and Quests for Immortality | Winner | [18] |
| Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall | Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown | Finalist | [19] | |
| Trevor Herriot | Jacob's Wound: A Search for the Spirit of Wildness | |||
| Patrick Lane | There is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden | |||
| Charles Montgomery | The Last Heathen: Encounters With Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia | |||
| 2005 | John Vaillant | The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed | Winner | [20] |
| Rebecca Godfrey | Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk | Finalist | [21] | |
| Stephen Lewis | Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa | |||
| J.B. MacKinnon | Dead Man in Paradise | |||
| 2006 | Dragan Todorovic | The Book of Revenge | Winner | [22] |
| Charlotte Gray | Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell | Finalist | [23] | |
| Barbara Kingscote | Ride the Rising Wind: One Woman's Journey Across Canada | |||
| Noah Richler | This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada | |||
| Rudy Wiebe | Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest | |||
| 2007 | Anna Porter | Kasztner's Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust | Winner | [24] |
| Katherine Ashenburg | The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History | Finalist | [25] | |
| Tim Bowling | The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture | |||
| Barry Gough | Fortune's a River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America | |||
| Douglas Hunter | God's Mercies: Rivalry, Betrayal and the Dream of Discovery | |||
| 2008 | Taras Grescoe | Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood | Winner | [26] |
| Carl Honoré | Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting | Finalist | [27] | |
| Mark Kingwell | Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City | |||
| Margaret Visser | The Gift of Thanks: The Roots, Persistence and Paradoxical Meanings of a Social Ritual | |||
| Russell Wangersky | Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself | |||
| 2009 | Brian Brett | Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life | Winner | [28] |
| Wade Davis | The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World | Finalist | [29] | |
| Trevor Herriot | Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds | |||
| Erika Ritter | The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath: Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal Relationships | |||
| Eric Siblin | The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece | |||
| 2010 | James FitzGerald | What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son's Quest to Redeem the Past | Winner | [30] |
| Ross King | Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven | Finalist | [31] | |
| Sarah Leavitt | Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother and Me | |||
| John Theberge and Mary Theberge | The Ptarmigan's Dilemma: An Exploration into How Life Organizes and Supports Itself | |||
| Merrily Weisbord | The Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das | |||
| 2011 | Charles Foran | Mordecai: The Life & Times | Winner | [32] |
| Charlotte Gill | Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe | Finalist | [33] | |
| Richard Gwyn | Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times; Volume Two: 1867-1891 | |||
| Grant Lawrence | Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nudist Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound | |||
| Ray Robertson | Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live | |||
| 2012 | Candace Savage | A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape | Winner | [34] |
| Kamal Al-Solaylee | Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes | Finalist | [34] | |
| Modris Eksteins | Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery, and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age | |||
| Taras Grescoe | Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile | |||
| JJ Lee | The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit | |||
| 2013 | Graeme Smith | The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan | Winner | [35] |
| Thomas King | The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America | Finalist | [36] | |
| J.B. MacKinnon | The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be | |||
| Andrew Steinmetz | This Great Escape: The Case of Michael Paryla | |||
| Priscila Uppal | Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother | |||
| 2014 | Naomi Klein | This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate | Winner | [37] |
| Susan Delacourt | Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them | Finalist | [37] | |
| Charles Montgomery | Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design | |||
| Paula Todd | Extreme Mean: Trolls, Bullies, and Predators Online | |||
| Kathleen Winter | Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage | |||
| 2015 | Rosemary Sullivan | Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva | Winner | [38] |
| Eliott Behar | Tell it to the World: International Justice and the Secret Campaign to Hide Mass Murder in Kosovo | Finalist | [39] | |
| Douglas Coupland | Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent | |||
| Dean Jobb | Empire of Deception: From Chicago to Nova Scotia – The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation | |||
| Lynette Loeppky | Cease: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Desire | |||
| 2016 | Deborah Campbell | Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War | Winner | [40] |
| Ian Brown | Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning? | Finalist | [41] | |
| Matti Friedman | Pumpkinflowers: An Israeli Soldier's Story | |||
| Ross King | Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies | |||
| Sonja Larsen | Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary | |||
| 2017 | James Maskalyk | Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine | Winner | [42] |
| Ivan Coyote | Tomboy Survival Guide | Finalist | [43] | |
| Kyo Maclear | Birds Art Life: A Field Guide to the Small and Significant | |||
| Carol Off | All We Leave Behind: A Reporter's Journey into the Lives of Others | |||
| Tanya Talaga | Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City | |||
| 2018 | Elizabeth Hay | All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Memoir | Winner | [44] |
| Will Aitken | Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo Van Hove, and the Art of Resistance | Finalist | [45] | |
| Terese Marie Mailhot | Heart Berries | |||
| Judi Rever | In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front | |||
| Lindsay Wong | The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family | |||
| 2019 | Jenny Heijun Wills | Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related | Winner | [46] |
| Alicia Elliott | Mind Spread Out on the Ground | Finalist | [47] | |
| Anna Mehler Paperny | Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person | |||
| Tanya Talaga | All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward | |||
| Ayelet Tsabari | The Art of Leaving | |||
| 2020 | Jessica J. Lee | Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts in Search of My Family's Past | Winner | [48] |
| Lorna Crozier | Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats) | Finalist | [48] | |
| Steven Heighton | Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos | |||
| Tessa McWatt | Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging | |||
| David Neel | The Way Home | |||
| 2021 | Tomson Highway | Permanent Astonishment | Winner | [49] |
| Jordan Abel | Nishga | Finalist | [50] | |
| Ken Haigh | On Foot to Canterbury | |||
| Darrel J. McLeod | Peyakow | |||
| Ian Williams | Disorientation | |||
| 2022 | Dan Werb | The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure | Winner | [51] |
| Geoff Dembicki | The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change | Finalist | [52] | |
| Tara McGowan-Ross | Nothing Will Be Different: A Memoir | |||
| Debra Thompson | The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging | |||
| Joshua Whitehead | Making Love with the Land | |||
| 2023 | Christina Sharpe | Ordinary Notes | Winner | [53] |
| Jamal Saeed | My Road from Damascus | Finalist | [54] | |
| Angela Sterritt | Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls | |||
| Emily Urquhart | Ordinary Wonder Tales | |||
| John Vaillant | Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World | |||
| 2024 | Martha Baillie | There Is No Blue | Winner | [55] |
| Chase Joynt | Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir | Finalist | [56] | |
| Amy Lin | Here After | |||
| Lisa Moore, Jack Whalen | Invisible Prisons: Jack Whalen’s Tireless Fight for Justice | |||
| Jenny Heijun Wills | Everything and Nothing At All | |||
| 2025 | Leanne Betasamosake Simpson | Theory of Water | Winner | [57] |
| Omar El Akkad | One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This | Shortlist | [58] | |
| Tessa McWatt | The Snag | |||
| Vinh Nguyen | The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse | |||
| Miriam Toews | A Truce That is Not Peace | |||
| 2026 | Richard Kelly Kemick | Decadence | Shortlist | [59] |
| Robert Moor | In Trees | |||
| Trina Moyles | Black Bear | |||
| Julian Brave NoiseCat | We Survived the Night | |||
| Dan Werb | Our Wild Familiars |
Weston International Award
In 2023, the Writers' Trust introduced the Weston International Award, a prize which honours international non-fiction writers. Unlike the Canadian award, the international award does not release a list of finalists in advance of the winner announcement, and honours the writer for their overall body of work rather than an individual book.
- 2023 – Robert Macfarlane[60]
- 2024 – Pankaj Mishra[61]
- 2025 – Leslie Jamison[62]
- 2026 – Hanif Abdurraqib[63]