News

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Jason Bell’s Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada’s Greatest Spy (HarperCollins Canada).

In public life, Dr. Winthrop Bell of Halifax was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. But as MI6 secret agent A12, he evaded gunfire and shook off pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy in 1919 Berlin. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for WWII, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6. Throughout this, a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress Bell’s alerts. Nevertheless, agent A12’s intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways that are only now being revealed.

Bell became a spy once again in the face of WWII. In 1939, he was the first to crack Hitler’s deadliest secret code: the Holocaust. But the führer was a popular politician who said he wanted peace. Could anyone believe Bell’s shocking warning? Fighting an epic intelligence war from Ukraine, Russia and Poland to France, Germany,

Canada and Washington, DC, A12 was the real-life 007, waging a single-handed fight against madmen bent on destroying the world. Without Bell’s astounding courage, the Nazis might just have won the war. Informed by recently declassified documents, Cracking the Nazi Code is the first book to illuminate the astonishing exploits of Winthrop Bell, agent A12.

Jason Bell, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick. He has served as a Fulbright professor in Germany (at Winthrop Bell’s alma mater, the University of Göttingen) and taught at universities in Belgium, the United States and Canada. He was the first scholar to be granted exclusive access to Winthrop Bell’s classified espionage papers. Despite the coincidence of their surname, Jason and Winthrop Bell are not known relations.

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay’s Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity (University of Manitoba Press).

Food insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways.

Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is neither a naturally occurring phenomenon nor the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as a lens to track the institutional presence of the Canadian state in the North, Burnett and Hay chart the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s.

They explore the roles of state food policy and the HBC and NWC in setting up, perpetuating, and profiting from food insecurity while undermining Indigenous food sovereignties and self-determination.

Plundering the North provides fresh insight into Canada’s settler colonial project by re-evaluating northern food policy and laying bare the governmental and corporate processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities.

Dr. Kristin Burnett is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Learn ing at Lakehead University. A settler scholar, Burnett has published broadly on topics related to Indigenous health and well-being, and much of her current research and policy work engages with systemic barriers to health care, social services and supports, and food.

Travis Hay is a historian of Canadian settler colonialism who was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is currently an assistant professor at Mount Royal University, the author of Inventing the Thrifty Gene, and the English Language Book Review Editor of Canadian Journal of Health History.

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight The North Star: Canada and the Civil War Plots Against Lincoln (Alfred A. Knopf Canada).

A riveting account of the years, months and days leading up to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the unexpected ways Canadians were involved in every aspect of the American Civil War.

Canadians take pride in being on the “good side” of the American Civil War, serving as a haven for 30,000 escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad. But dwelling in history’s shadow is the much darker role Canada played in supporting the slave South and in fomenting the many plots against Lincoln.

The book shines a spotlight on the stories of such intrepid figures as Anderson Abbott, Canada’s first Black doctor, who joined the Union Army; Emma Edmonds, the New Brunswick woman who disguised herself as a man to enlist as a Union nurse; and Edward P. Doherty, the Quebec man who led the hunt to track down Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

At the same time, the Canadian political and business elite were aiding the slave states. Toronto aristocrat George Taylor Denison III bankrolled Confederate operations and opened his mansion to their agents. The Catholic Church helped one of Booth’s accused accomplices hide out for months in the Quebec countryside. A leading financier in Montreal let Confederates launder money through his bank.

Sher creates vivid portraits of places we thought we knew. Montreal was a sort of nineteenth-century Casablanca of the North: a hub for assassins, money-men, mercenaries and soldiers on the run. Toronto was a headquarters for Confederate plotters and gun-runners. The two largest hotels in the country became nests of Confederate spies.

Meticulously researched and richly illustrated, The North Star is a sweeping tale that makes long-ago events leap off the page with a relevance to the present day.

Julian Sher is an award-winning journalist and the author of seven books, including “Until You Are Dead”: The Wrongful Conviction of Steven Truscott and White Hoods: Canada’s Ku Klux Klan. He co-authored two books on biker gangs, The Road to Hell and Angels of Death, and wrote two books on crimes against children, One Child at a Time and Somebody’s Daughter.

As an investigative reporter, he worked for the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. He was a Senior Producer of CBC’s the fifth estate, Canada’s premier investigative TV program, for five years. He has directed and written major documentaries, covering wars and intrigue across the globe. His documentary Nuclear Jihad, produced for the New York Times and CBC, won the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

His 2021 film, Ghosts of Afghanistan, won three top Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Documentary. He is also active in protecting media freedoms, as a Senior Fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Free Expression and working with Journalists for Human Rights.

 

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Gabriel Allahdua’s Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada (Between the Lines).

In this singular firsthand account, a former migrant worker reveals a disturbing system of exploitation at the heart of Canada’s farm labour system.

When Gabriel Allahdua applied to the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Canada, he thought he would be leaving his home in St. Lucia to work in a country with a sterling human rights reputation and commitment to multiculturalism. Instead, breakneck quotas and a culture of fear dominated his four years in a mega-greenhouse in Ontario. This deeply personal memoir takes readers behind the scenes to see what life is really like for the people who produce Canada’s food.

Now, as a leading activist in the migrant justice movement in Canada, Allahdua is fighting back against the Canadian government to demand rights and respect for temporary foreign labourers. Harvesting Freedom shows Canada’s place in the long history of slavery, colonialism, and inequality that has linked the Caribbean to the wider world for half a millennium—but also the tireless determination of Caribbean people to fight for their freedom.

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality (ECW Press).

Part memoir, part history, part political manifesto, Seeking Social Democracy offers the first full-length treatment of Ed Broadbent’s ideas and remarkable seven-decade engagement in public life.

In dialogue with three collaborators from different generations, Broadbent leads readers through a life spent fighting for equality in Parliament and beyond: exploring the formation of his social democratic ideals, his engagement on the international stage, and his relationships with historical figures from Pierre Trudeau and Fidel Castro to Tommy Douglas, René Lévesque, and Willy Brandt.

From the formative minority Parliament of 1972–1974 to the contentious national debate over Canada’s constitution to the free trade election of 1988, the book chronicles the life and thought of one of Canada’s most respected political leaders and public intellectuals from his childhood in 1930s Oshawa to the present day. Broadbent’s analysis also points toward the future, offering lessons to a new generation on how principles can inform action and social democracy can look beyond neoliberalism. The result is an engaging, timely, and sweeping analysis of Canadian politics, philosophy, and the nature of democratic leadership.

Ed Broadbent PC CC was the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party from 1975 to 1989 and member of Parliament for Oshawa (1968–1990) and Ottawa Centre (2004–2006).

 Before his entry into politics, he taught political theory at York University. He was vice president of the Socialist International from 1979 to 1989 and director of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development from 1990 to 1996.

In 2011, he was the founding chair of the Broadbent Institute. He was appointed a member of the Privy Council by PrimeMinister Pierre Trudeau in 1982 and in2001 received the highest civilian honour when he was made Companion of the Order of Canada. He is the editor of Democratic Inequality: What Went Wrong? and a frequent author of newspaper and magazine opinion articles.

Frances Abele CM is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy Emerita at Carleton University.

She is a research fellow at the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation and the Broadbent Institute.

Much of her work focuses on Indigenous-Canada relations.

Jonathan Sas has worked in senior policy and political roles in government, think tanks, and the labour movement.

He is an honorary witness to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

His writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, National Post, The Tyee, and Maisonneuve Magazine.

Luke Savage is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared i n The Atlantic, The Guardian, Jacobin, the New Statesman, the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and theLiterary Review of Canada.

His first book, The Dead Center, was published in 2022.

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.

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

• Gabriel Allahdua with Edward Dunsworth. Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines.
  
  
• Leo Baskatawang. Reclaiming Anishnaabe Law: Kinamaadiwin Inaakonigewin and the Treaty Right to Education. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
  
  
• Jason Bell. Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada’s Greatest Spy. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers.
  
  
• Ed Broadbent with Frances Abele, Jonathan Sas and Luke Savage. Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality. Toronto: ECW Press Ltd.
  
  
• Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay. Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
  
  
• Michelle Good. Truth Telling: Seven Conversations About Indigenous Life in Canada. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers.
  
  
• Ken McGoogan. Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery. Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre.
  
  
• Benjamin Perrin. Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial. Toronto: UTP.
  
  
• Julian Sher. The North Star: Canada and the Civil War Plots Against Lincoln. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
  
  
• John Vaillant. Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada.

 

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.