Book about the Bay’s empire takes home $10K prize

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This article was published 19/05/2021 (1609 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A book documenting the history and the people behind one of Canada’s definitive institutions — the Hudson’s Bay Co. — is the winner of the 2021 John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize, an award that comes with a $10,000 cheque.

The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire by Stephen R. Bown was the unanimous choice for the award, named after the famed journalist J.W. Dafoe, who served as editor of the Manitoba Free Press (later the Winnipeg Free Press) from 1901 through 1944. The annual award goes to the best book on Canada, Canadians, and/or Canada’s place in the world.

Judges called the Alberta-based Bown’s book “a well-written corporate biography for this generation” and a “thorough and comprensive history of the internal operation that helped create Western Canada.” More than 350 years after the company’s founding, the judges deemed that Bown accomplished the book’s goal, tracing the company’s growth to a corporate behemoth that remains a powerful symbol well into the 21st century, despite struggles.

“At a time when the downtown Bay is a white elephant in many Western Canadian cities, this book is a timely reminder of the vast and historic successes — and flaws — of the company and how the recent history of Western Canada is really a corporate one,” wrote Mary Agnes Welch, one of the judges.

Through focusing on key figures such as George Simpson and Samuel Hearne, as well as those who’d previously been slighted, including Chipewyan guide and interpreter Thanadelthur, the bilingual Matonabbee, and Black translator James Douglas, Bown shed new and intriguing light on one of the country’s foundational stories. The book was selected from a short list of four, winnowed down from a pool of 30 entrants.

Bown has written 10 books tackling subjects that include scurvy, the Treaty of Tordesillas, Capt. George Vancouver and Roald Amundsen. For his work, he’s been honoured with the BC Book Prize and the Alberta Book Award, and was shortlisted for the prestigious RBC Taylor Prize for his book The Island of Blue Foxes, which documented Vitus Bering’s voyage to Alaska.

The Dafoe prize has been given by the Dafoe Foundation for works in Canadian non-fiction since 1984, with previous winners including John M. Bumsted, Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson, Kim Bolan, and Paul Wells. Last year’s winner was Brendan Kelly for his book The Good Fight: Marcel Cadieux and Canadian Diplomacy.

Bown will receive the award formally at a banquet in the fall in Winnipeg, as long as the current public health crisis allows for it, a release from the board of directors said. The board is chaired by Christopher Adams, adjunct professor in political studies at the University of Manitoba. Free Press editor Paul Samyn sits on the board. Jurors were Welch, Eugene Walz and Emoke Szathmary.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca