Canada Reads winner Michelle Good finalist for $60K Balsillie Prize for best public policy book
The annual award recognizes nonfiction that advances public discourse
Canada Reads winner Michelle Good has made the shortlist for this year's Balsillie Prize for Public Policy.
Established in 2021, the annual $60,000 award recognizes the best nonfiction book that advances public discourse relevant to Canadians.
Cree lawyer and writer Good is shortlisted for her book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada, a collection of essays exploring the contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada.
"Truth Telling is a powerful, urgent, and necessary book that gets to the heart of true reconciliation and maps a course for achieving it," said the jury, composed of author and physician Samantha Nutt, policy expert Taki Sarantakis and digital strategist Scott Young in a press statement. "Bridging personal stories and lived experiences with sharp historical analysis, Michelle Good's writing is both beautiful and heartbreaking."
Good is also the author of Five Little Indians, which won several awards, including Canada Reads 2022 and the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. It follows the stories of five residential school survivors and how they cope with the past and move forward.
The other nominees are Ryan Manucha, Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb, David R. Samson and Max Wyman.
Manucha is on the shortlist for Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade, which weaves together an understanding of international and domestic trade policy, a review of legal cases, history and considerations of the actual practical operations of tribunals and secretariats. It won the 2022 Donner Prize for best book on public policy.
Agrawal, Gans and Goldfarb are nominated for their book Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, on how business leaders can make AI disruptions work for them.
Finalist Our Tribal Future: How to Channel Our Foundational Human Instincts into a Force for Good by Samson discusses the science behind tribalism and explains how to use it to make positive change.
Cultural commentator Wyman's The Compassionate Imagination: How the Arts Are Central to a Functioning Democracy is also shortlisted. It reimagines what Canadian society would look like if art and culture were at the centre of policy making.
The five finalists were selected by the jury from 43 titles submitted by 25 publishing imprints. The winner will be announced on Nov. 28 at a private dinner at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.
Each finalist will receive $5,000.
The prize is funded by businessman and philanthropist Jim Balsillie, as part of his $3 million donation to Writers' Trust to support Canadian literature. It's the largest award of its kind for Canadian public policy titles.
He also funded the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, renamed in 2021 after Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, two of the founders of Writers' Trust of Canada.
The Writers' Trust of Canada is an organization that supports Canadian writers through literary awards, fellowships, financial grants, mentorships and more.
It also gives out seven prizes in recognition of the year's best in fiction, nonfiction and short story, as well as mid-career and lifetime achievement awards. The finalists for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize were announced on Sept. 27. The shortlist for the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers' Prize for Nonfiction was revealed on Sept. 21.
Previous Balsillie Prize winners include Innovation in Real Places by Dan Breznitz and Dream States by John Lorinc.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
