Author: Ariel Gordon

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Longlist #1: Michelle Good’s Truth Telling

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Michelle Good’s Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada (HarperCollins Canada).

A bold, provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada. With authority and insight, Truth Telling examines a wide range of Indigenous issues framed by Michelle Good’s personal experience and knowledge.

From racism, broken treaties, and cultural pillaging, to the value of Indigenous lives and the importance of Indigenous literature, this collection reveals facts about Indigenous life in Canada that are both devastating and enlightening. Truth Telling also demonstrates the myths underlying Canadian history and the human cost of colonialism, showing how it continues to underpin modern social institutions in Canada.

Passionate and uncompromising, Michelle Good affirms that meaningful and substantive reconciliation hinges on recognition of Indigenous self-determination, the return of lands, and a just redistribution of the wealth that has been taken from those lands without regard for Indigenous peoples. Truth Telling is essential reading for those looking to acknowledge the past and understand the way forward.

MICHELLE GOOD is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After three decades of working with Indigenous communities and organizations, she obtained her law degree. She earned her MFA in creative writing at UBC while still practising law. Her novel, Five Little Indians, was nominated for the Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It received the HarperCollins Publishers Ltd/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Five Little Indians was also chosen for Canada Reads in 2022. Michelle Good’s poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada.

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Dafoe Book Prize Longlist 2024

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, we are pleased to announce that this year, there will be a longlist and a shortlist before the winner is announced.

Our thanks to jurors Dale Barbour, Catherine Cook, and Gregory Mason.

2024 Longlist

 

Over the coming weeks, we will be highlighting each of these longlisted titles.

We will be announcing the 5 shortlisted books on May 9.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, now valued at $12,000, will be named June 10.

The prize memorializes John Wesley Dafoe, one of the most significant Canadian editors of the 20th century. It is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians and the nation in international affairs. In his tenure at the Manitoba Free Press, later renamed the Winnipeg Free Press, from 1901-1944, Dafoe was known for his advocacy of western development, free trade and national independence.

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Meet the 2024 Jurors!

The John Wesley Dafoe Foundation is pleased to introduce the jurors for 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize!

This year, Dale Barbour, Catherine Cook, and Gregory Mason will be selecting a longlist, shortlist, and winner, to celebrate forty years of the prize.

A ten-book longlist and five-book shortlist will be announced in the coming weeks, with the winner announced June 10. We are looking forward to celebrating these worthy titles!

A white man wearing a grey button up shirt, with trees and grass in the background.In the meantime, here’s more about our jurors!

Dale Barbour grew up on a farm in Manitoba and worked in journalism and communications before getting hooked on history. He completed his PhD in history at the University of Toronto in 2018 and was the University of Winnipeg’s 2021 H. Sanford Riley Postdoctoral Fellow. Barbour’s scholarship pulls together gender, leisure, urban, and environmental history approaches to examine how people find and create recreation spaces. He is the author of two books: Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967, (University of Manitoba Press, 2011) and Undressed Toronto: From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside, How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850–1935 (UMP, 2021).

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An Indigenous woman with bobbed hair and glasses, wearing a brown vest and dark scarf. The background is white.

After more than 30 years with the University of Manitoba, Vice-President (Indigenous) Catherine Cook, MD, MSc, CCFP, FCFP retired in early 2024. As an advocate for Indigenous peoples’ health, Cook served as Vice-President of Population and Public Health at the Winnipeg Regional Health Organization (WRHA), provincial lead of Indigenous health at Shared Health Manitoba; as an associate professor of community health sciences; as vice-dean of Indigenous Health; and most recently as the inaugural vice-president (Indigenous) UM. One of the highlights of Cook’s career was the establishment of Ongomiizwin—Indigenous Institute of Health and Healing.

A white man with a mustache and beard, wearing a white dress shirt and a tie. He is inside, with walls and doors behind him.

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Specializing in economic policy, the basic annual income, health economics, and Indigenous economics, Gregory Mason joined the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1974 . He received his PhD in Economics, Management Science and City Planning from the University of British Columbia in 1975. From 1981 to 1986, Greg directed the Institute for Social and Economic Research, where he was responsible for over $2.5 million of research, including the Mincome Manitoba experimental data. Recently he has written on the economics of COVID, telemedicine, electronic health records, the modern annuity, and urban reserves.

 

 

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