List of Past Winners

Year
Title
Author
2014
The Back of the Turtle
Thomas King
Lake of Two Mountains
Arleen Paré
Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays
Jordan Tannahill
The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve
Lost in a World of Constant Connection
Michael Harris
When Everything Feels like the Movies
Raziel Reid
This One Summer
Jillian Tamaki
Paul-Émile Borduas: A Critical Biography
Peter Feldstein
The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton
North End Love Songs
Katherena Vermette
Fault Lines: Three Plays
Nicolas Billon
Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page
Sandra Djwa
The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B
Teresa Toten
Northwest Passage
Matt James
The Major Verbs
Donald Winkler
2013
Year
Title
Author
2012
The Purchase
Linda Spalding
Monkey Ranch
Julie Bruck
It is Solved by Walking
Catherine Banks
Leonardo and the Last Supper
Ross King
The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen
Susin Nielsen
Virginia Wolf
Isabelle Arsenault
Mai at the Predators’ Ball
Nigel Spencer
The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt
Killdeer
Phil Hall
If We Were Birds
Erin Shields
Mordecai: The Life & Times
Charles Foran
From Then to Now: A Short
History of the World
Christopher Moore
Ten Birds
Cybèle Young
Partita for Glenn Gould
Donald Winkler
2011
2
Year
Title
Author
2010
Cool Water
Dianne Warren
Boxing the Compass
Richard Greene
Afterimage
Robert Chafe
Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada
Allan Casey
Fishtailing
Wendy Phillips
Cats’ Night Out
Jon Klassen
Forests
Linda Gaboriau
The Mistress of Nothing
Kate Pullinger
The Fly in Autumn
David Zieroth
Where the Blood Mixes
Kevin Loring
A Place Within: Rediscovering India
M.G. Vassanji
Greener Grass: The Famine Years
Caroline Pignat
Bella’s Tree
Jirina Marton
Pieces of Me
Susan Ouriou
2009
3
Year
Title
Author
2008
The Origin of Species
Nino Ricci
More to Keep Us Warm
Jacob Scheier
Bone Cage
Catherine Banks
Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship,
Life and Death from Inside the New
Canadian Army
Christie Blatchford
The Landing
John Ibbitson
The Owl and the Pussycat
Stéphane Jorisch
Nikolski
Lazer Lederhendler
Divisadero
Michael Ondaatje
All Our Wonder Unavenged
Don Domanski
The December Man (L’homme de décembre)
Colleen Murphy
I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land:
A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad
Karolyn Smardz Frost
Gemini Summer
Iain Lawrence
The Boy from the Sun
Duncan Weller
Augustino and the Choir of Destruction
Nigel Spencer
2007
4
Year
Title
Author
2006
The Law of Dreams
Peter Behrens
Stumbling in the Bloom
John Pass
I Still Love You
Daniel MacIvor
The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary
Decade That Gave the World Impressionism
Ross King
Pirate’s Passage
William Gilkerson
Ancient Thunder
Leo Yerxa
Vetiver
Hugh Hazelton
A Perfect Night to Go to China
David Gilmour
Processional
Anne Compton
Half Life
John Mighton
The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth,
Madness and Greed
John Vaillant
The Crazy Man
Pamela Porter
Imagine a Day
Rob Gonsalves
Truth or Death: The Quest for Immortality
in the Western Narrative Tradition
Fred A. Reed
2005
5
Year
Title
Author
2004
A Complicated Kindness
Miriam Toews
Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida
Roo Borson
Girl in the Goldfish Bowl
Morris Panych
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of
Humanity in Rwanda
Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire
Airborn
Kenneth Oppel
Jabberwocky
Stéphane Jorisch
Mirabel
Judith Cowan
Elle
Douglas Glover
Kill-site
Tim Lilburn
Einstein’s Gift
Vern Thiessen
Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World
Margaret MacMillan
Stitches
Glen Huser
The Song Within My Heart
Allen Sapp
Memoirs of a Less Travelled Road:
A Historian’s Life
Jane Brierley
2003
6
Year
Title
Author
2002
A Song for Nettie Johnson
Gloria Sawai
Surrender
Roy Miki
Unity (1918)
Kevin Kerr
Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War
Against Big Oil
Andrew Nikiforuk
True Confessions of a Heartless Girl
Martha Brooks
Alphabeasts
Wallace Edwards
Thunder and Light
Nigel Spencer
Clara Callan
Richard B. Wright
Execution Poems
George Elliott Clarke
The Harps of God
Kent Stetson
The Ingenuity Gap
Thomas Homer-Dixon
Dust
Arthur Slade
An Island in the Soup
Mireille Levert
Fairy Ring
Fred A. Reed and
David Homel
2001
7
Year
Title
Author
2000
Anil’s Ghost
Michael Ondaatje
Another Gravity
Don McKay
Elizabeth Rex
Timothy Findley
Notes from the Hyena’s Belly
Nega Mezlekia
Looking for X
Deborah Ellis
Yuck, a Love Story
Marie-Louise Gay
Just Fine
Robert Majzels
Elizabeth and After
Matt Cohen
Songs for Relinquishing the Earth
Jan Zwicky
The Drawer Boy
Michael Healey
Water
Marq de Villiers
A Screaming Kind of Day
Rachna Gilmore
The Great Poochini
Gary Clement
Gabrielle Roy: A Life
Patricia Claxton
1999
8
Year
Title
Author
1998
Forms of Devotion
Diane Schoemperlen
White Stone: The Alice Poems
Stephanie Bolster
Harlem Duet
Djanet Sears
Lines on the Water – A Fisherman’s Life
on the Miramichi
David Adams Richards
The Hollow Tree
Janet Lunn
A Child’s Treasury of Nursery Rhymes
Kady MacDonald Denton
Bambi and Me
Sheila Fischman
The Underpainter
Jane Urquhart
Land to Light On
Dionne Brand
fareWel
Ian Ross
Drumblair – Memories of a Jamaican Childhood
Rachel Manley
Awake and Dreaming
Kit Pearson
The Party
Barbara Reid
The Euguelion
Howard Scott
1997
9
Year
Title
Author
1996
The Englishman’s Boy
Guy Vanderhaeghe
Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano
E.D. Blodgett
The Monument
Colleen Wagner
The Unconscious Civilization
John Ralston Saul
Ghost Train
Paul Yee
The Rooster’s Gift
Eric Beddows
Stone and Ashes
Linda Gaboriau
The Roaring Girl
Greg Hollingshead
Voice
Anne Szumigalski
Three in the Back, Two in the Head
Jason Sherman
Shadow Maker: The Life of
Gwendolyn MacEwen
Rosemary Sullivan
The Maestro
Tim Wynne-Jones
The Last Quest of Gilgamesh
Ludmila Zeman
Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex?
David Homel
1995
10
Year
Title
Author
1994
A Discovery of Strangers
Rudy Wiebe
Cantos from a Small Room
Robert Hilles
The Ends of the Earth
Morris Panych
Rogue Primate
John A. Livingston
Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me
Julie Johnston
Josepha: A Prairie Boy’s Story
Murray Kimber
The Lyric Generation
Donald Winkler
The Stone Diaries
Carol Shields
Forests of the Medieval World
Don Coles
Fronteras Americanas
Guillermo Verdecchia
Touch the Dragon
Karen Connelly
Some of the Kinder Planets
Tim Wynne-Jones
Sleep Tight, Mrs. Ming
Mireille Levert
Categorics One, Two and Three
D.G. Jones
1993
11
Year
Title
Author
1992
The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
Inventing the Hawk
Lorna Crozier
Possible Worlds and A Short History of Night
John Mighton
Revenge of the Land: A Century of Greed,
Tragedy and Murder on a Saskatchewan Farm
Maggie Siggins
Hero of Lesser Causes
Julie Johnston
Waiting for the Whales
Ron Lightburn
Imagining the Middle East
Fred A. Reed
Such a Long Journey
Rohinton Mistry
Night Field
Don McKay
Amigo’s Blue Guitar
Joan MacLeod
Occupied Canada: A Young White Man
Discovers His Unsuspected Past
Robert Hunter and
Robert Calihoo
Doctor Kiss Says Yes
Joanne Fitzgerald
Pick-Up Sticks
Sarah Ellis
A Dictionary of Literary Devices: Gradus, A-Z
Albert W. Halsall
1991
12
Year
Title
Author
1990
Lives of the Saints
Nino Ricci
No Time
Margaret Avison
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Trudeau and Our Times
Stephen Clarkson and
Christina McCall
The Orphan Boy
Paul Morin
Redwork
Michael Bedard
Yellow-Wolf and Other Tales of
the Saint Lawrence
Jane Brierley
Whale Music
Paul Quarrington
The Word for Sand
Heather Spears
The Other Side of the Dark
Judith Thompson
Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham
Robert Calder
The Magic Paintbrush
Robin Muller
Bad Boy
Diana Wieler
On the Eighth Day
Wayne Grady
1989
13
Year
Title
Author
1988
Nights Below Station Street
David Adams Richards
Furious
Erin Mouré
Nothing Sacred
George F. Walker
In the Sleep Room
Anne Collins
Amos’s Sweater
Kim LaFave
The Third Magic
Welwyn Wilton Katz
Second Chance
Philip Stratford
A Dream Like Mine
M.T. Kelly
Afterworlds
Gwendolyn MacEwen
Prague
John Krizanc
The Russian Album
Michael Ignatieff
Rainy Day Magic
Marie-Louise Gay
Galahad Schwartz and the Cochroach Army
Morgan Nyberg
Enchantment and Sorrow: The Autobiography
of Gabrielle Roy
Patricia Claxton
1987
14
Year
Title
Author
1986
The Progress of Love
Alice Munro
The Collected Poems of Al Purdy
Al Purdy
Doc
Sharon Pollock
Northrop Frye on Shakespeare
Northrop Frye
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
Waiting for Saskatchewan
Fred Wah
Criminals in Love
George F. Walker
The Regenerators: Social Criticism
in Late Victorian English Canada
Ramsay Cook
The Engineer of Human Souls
Josef Skvorecky
Celestial Navigation
Paulette Jiles
White Biting Dog
Judith Thompson
The Private Capital: Ambition and Love
in the Age of Macdonald and Laurier
Sandra Gwyn
1985
1984
15
Year
Title
Author
1983
Shakespeare’s Dog
Leon Rooke
Settlements
David Donnell
Quiet in the Land
Anne Chislett
Byng of Vimy: General and Govenor General
Jeffery Williams
Man Descending
Guy Vanderhaeghe
The Vision Tree: Selected Poems
Phyllis Webb
Billy Bishop Goes To War, a play by John Gray
with Eric Peterson
John Gray
Louisbourg Portraits: Life in an
Eighteenth-Century Garrison Town
Christopher Moore
Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories
Mavis Gallant
The Collected Poems of F.R. Scott
F.R. Scott
Blood Relations
Sharon Pollock
Caribou and the Barren-Lands
George Calef
1982
1981
16
Year
Title
Author
1980
Burning Water
George Bowering
McAlmon’s Chinese Opera
Stephen Scobie
Discipline of Power: The Conservative
Interlude and the Liberal Restoration
Jeffrey Simpson
The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne
Jack Hodgins
Emily Carr: A Biography
Maria Tippett
There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do
Michael Ondaatje
Go Boy
Roger Caron
Who Do You Think You Are?
Alice Munro
Poems New and Selected
Patrick Lane
The Wars
Timothy Findley
Essays on the Constitution
Frank Scott
Under the Thunder the Flowers
Light up the Earth
D.G. Jones
1979
1978
1977
17
Year
Title
Author
1976
The Writing of Canadian History
Carl Berger
Bear
Marian Engel
Top Soil
Joe Rosenblatt
Hallowed Walls
Marion MacRae and
Anthony Adamson
The Great Victorian Collection
Brian Moore
The Island Means Minago
Milton Acorn
Fire on Stone
Ralph Gustafson
The Diviners
Margaret Laurence
The Siren Years
Charles Ritchie
Painters in a New Land
Michael Bell
Lions at her Face
Miriam Mandel
The Temptations of Big Bear
Rudy Wiebe
1975
1974
1973
18
Year
Title
Author
1972
The Manticore
Robertson Davies
Civil Elegies and Other Poems
Dennis Lee
Lies
John Newlove
The Last Spike
Pierre Berton
Selected Poems
John Glassco
St. Urbain’s Horseman
Mordecai Richler
The New Ancestors
Dave Godfrey
Still Water
bpNichol
The True Eventual Story of Billy The Kid
bpNichol
Beach Head
bpNichol
The cosmic chef: an evening of concrete
bpNichol
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Michael Ondaatje
1971
1970
19
Year
Title
Author
1969
Rocky Mountain Foot and
The Gangs of Kosmos
George Bowering
The Studhorse Man
Robert Kroetsch
The Shadow-Maker
Gwendolyn MacEwen
Selected Poems 1956-68
Leonard Cohen
Dance of the Happy Shades
Alice Munro
Cocksure and Hunting Tigers Under Glass
Mordecai Richler
An Idiot Joy
Eli Mandel
Bread, Wine and Salt
Alden Nowlan
The Oxford Companion to Canadian History
and Literature
Norah Story
The Circle Game
Margaret Atwood
A Jest of God
Margaret Laurence
The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell
George Woodcock
1968
1967
1966
20
Year
Title
Author
1965
In Defence of Canada
James Eayrs
The Cariboo Horses
Alfred Purdy
John Addington Symonds
Phyllis Grosskurth
The Deserter
Douglas LePan
The Colour of the Times
Raymond Souster
Brown of the Globe
J.M.S. Careless
Hugh Garner’s Best Stories
Hugh Garner
Running to Paradise
Kildare Dobbs
The Gutenberg Galaxy
Marshall McLuhan
Twelve Letters to a Small Town
and The Killdeer and Other Plays
James Reaney
1964
1963
1962
21
Year
Title
Author
1961
Acis in Oxford
Robert Finch
The Ascent of Life
T.A. Goudge
Hear Us O Lord from Heaven
Thy Dwelling Place
Malcolm Lowry
Winter Sun
Margaret Avison
The Luck of Ginger Coffey
Brian Moore
In Search of Canadian Liberalism
Frank H. Underhill
Red Carpet for the Sun
Irving Layton
The Watch that Ends the Night
Hugh MacLennan
Execution
Colin McDougall
A Suit of Nettles
James Reaney
Klondike
Pierre Berton
The History of Fanny Burney
Joyce Hemlow
Nkwala
Edith L. Sharp
1960
1959
1958
22
Year
Title
Author
1957
Street of Riches (translation)
Gabrielle Roy
The Boatman
Jay Macpherson
Canada: Tomorrow’s Giant
Bruce Hutchison
The Path of Destiny
Thomas H. Raddall
The Great Chief
Kerry Wood
The Sacrifice
Adele Wiseman
A Window on the North
Robert A.D. Ford
The Mysterious North
Pierre Berton
Century of Conflict
Joseph Lister Rutledge
Lost in the Barrens
Farley Mowat
The Sixth of June
Lionel Shapiro
Friday’s Child
Wilfred Watson
Man’s Emerging Mind
N.J. Berrill
John A. Macdonald, The Old Chieftain
Donald G. Creighton
The Map-Maker
Kerry Wood
1956
1955
23
Year
Title
Author
1954
The Fall of a Titan
Igor Gouzenko
The Metal and the Flower
P.K. Page
Thirty and Three
Hugh MacLennan
This Most Famous Stream
A.R.M. Lower
The Nor’westers
Marjorie Wilkins Campbell
Digby
David Walker
The Net and the Sword
Douglas LePan
Sex and the Nature of Things
N.J. Berrill
Canada, A Story of Challenge
J.M.S. Careless
Rebels Ride at Night
John F. Hayes
The Pillar
David Walker
Towards the Last Spike
E.J. Pratt
The Incredible Canadian
Bruce Hutchison
John A. Macdonald, The Young Politician
Donald G. Creighton
Cargoes on the Great Lakes
Marie McPhedran
1953
1952
24
Year
Title
Author
1951
The Loved and the Lost
Morley Callaghan
The Mulgrave Road
Charles Bruce
The Ardent Exile
Josephine Phelan
The Government of Prince Edward Island
Frank MacKinnon
A Land Divided
John F. Hayes
The Outlander (translation)
Germaine Guèvremont
Of Time and the Lover
James Wreford Watson
The Saskatchewan
Marjorie Wilkins Campbell
The Progressive Party in Canada
W.L. Morton
The Great Adventure
Donalda Dickie
Mr. Ames Against Time
Philip Child
The Red Heart
James Reaney
Cross-country
Hugh MacLennan
Democratic Government in Canada
R. MacGregor Dawson
1950
1949
25
Year
Title
Author
1948
The Precipice
Hugh MacLennan
The Rocking Chair and Other Poems
A.M. Klein
Halifax, Warden of the North
Thomas H. Raddall
The Canadian Army, 1939-1945
C.P. Stacey
The Tin Flute (translation)
Gabrielle Roy
Poems for People
Dorothy Livesay
Haida
William Sclater
The Government of Canada
R. MacGregor Dawson
Continental Revue
Winifred Bambrick
Poems
Robert Finch
In Search of Myself
Frederick Philip Grove
Colony to Nation
A.R.M. Lower
1947
1946
26
Year
Title
Author
1945
Two Solitudes
Hugh MacLennan
Now is Time
Earle Birney
We Keep a Light
Evelyn M. Richardson
Gauntlet to Overlord
Ross Munro
Earth and High Heaven
Gwethalyn Graham
Day and Night
Dorothy Livesay
Partner in Three Worlds
Dorothy Duncan
The War: Fourth Year
Edgar McInnis
The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek
Thomas H. Raddall
News of the Phoenix
A.J.M. Smith
The Incomplete Anglers
John D. Robins
On Canadian Poetry
E.K. Brown
1944
1943
27
Year
Title
Author
1942
Little Man
G. Herbert Sallans
David and Other Poems
Earle Birney
The Unknown Country
Bruce Hutchison
The Unguarded Frontier
Edgar McInnis
Three Came to Ville Marie
Alan Sullivan
Calling Adventurers
Anne Marriott
Klee Wyck
Emily Carr
Thirty Acres (translation)
Ringuet (pseud.)
Brébeuf and His Brethren
E.J. Pratt
Slava Bohu
J.F.C. Wright
The Champlain Road
Franklin D. McDowell
Under the Sun
Arthur S. Bourinot
Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter
Laura G. Salverson
1941
1940
1939
28
Year
Title
Author
1938
Swiss Sonata
Gwethalyn Graham
By Stubborn Stars
Kenneth Leslie
Canadian Mosaic
John Murray Gibbon
The Dark Weaver
Laura G. Salverson
The Fable of the Goats
E.J. Pratt
My Discovery of the West
Stephen Leacock
Think of The Earth
Bertram Brooker
T.B.R.—newspaper pieces
T.B. Roberton
1937
1936
29