The three-person jury for the 2025 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for nonfiction has chosen the five finalists for the award, to be presented at a ceremony on Nov. 13.

And the nominees are: Miriam Toews for A Truce That Is Not Peace; Omar El Akkad for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This; Tessa McWatt for The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead; and Vinh Nguyen for The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse.

The jury was comprised of Winnipeg author and Free Press columnist Niigaan Sinclair alongside Winnipeg-born, Nova Scotia-based poet Lori Nielsen Glenn (The Old Moon in Her Arms, Following the River) and Toronto’s Matthew R. Morris (Black Boys Like Me).

The winner takes home $75,000, while each of the finalists receives $5,000.

A brash, arrogant rising theatre star from the U.S. is murdered with a straight razor on a riverbank outside Glasgow, then a second member of the Sweeney Todd troupe tumbles down steep stairs, and a third — well, it’s a busy time for detective chief superintendent William Lorimer and his familiar decent-folk crew.

Detective inspector Molly Newton is a key sleuth on the murders while pondering her future with Daniel Kohi, the Zimbabwean refugee ace copper who’s been picked as the diversity face of Police Scotland; his mother disapproves of Molly’s refusal to believe in a deity, and the whole independent woman thing.

Alex Gray’s Act of Malice (Sphere, 400 pages, $38) is a terrific police procedural from a scandalously underappreciated murder mystery author.

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Three books with Manitoba connections have made the 10-book long list for the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize.

The prize, named after former Manitoba Free Press (and then Winnipeg Free Press) editor John Wesley Dafoe, honours what jurors deem the best book “on Canada, Canadians, and/or Canada’s place in the world,” and comes with a $12,000 prize.

Among the longlisted titles for this year’s prize is Free Press columnist Niigaan Sinclair’s Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre, in which Sinclair examines Canada’s relationship with Indigenous communities through a Winnipeg-centred lens. Wînipêk won Sinclair the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction.

Another award-winning local book on the list is Winnipeg author Gerald Friesen’s The Honourable John Norquay: Indigenous Premier, Canadian Statesman, published by University of Manitoba Press. The book won the Margaret McWilliams Award in the scholarly category and the Association for Manitoba Archives’ Manitoba Day Award for scholarly works from the Manitoba Historical Society, among other awards.

Kia Abdullah isn’t a household name, but it probably should be.

What Happens in the Dark (HQ, 400 pages, $25) is Abdullah’s eighth novel, the story of two childhood friends who reunite as adults under difficult circumstances. Lily Astor is a popular television host accused of murder; Safa Saleem is a disgraced newspaper reporter who sees a chance to turn her professional life around. Neither can anticipate how her life will actually change.

Abdullah’s novels feature carefully drawn, abundantly human characters. She tackles some serious themes — racism, violence against women, the malleability of truth — but doesn’t lecture the reader and never lets the story get overwhelmingly dark. If you’ve never read a novel by this first-rate storyteller, now’s your chance.

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