Canadian writer Nadim Roberts among winners of 2024 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant
The U.S. grant supports writers working on multi-year, book-length nonfiction projects
Vancouver writer and journalist Nadim Roberts is among the ten winners of a 2024 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant.
The $40,000 US ($56,105 Cdn) award is an initiative by the New York Whiting Foundation that supports writers working on multi-year, book-length nonfiction projects.
Roberts, born in Canada but now based in London, U.K., is the first recipient with a Canadian-originating publisher (Signal, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart).
When the award was launched in 2016, only writers with books coming out with American publishers were eligible for the grant. In 2022, authors with contracts with Canadian and British publishers were included.
Roberts' forthcoming book, with the provisional title The Highway, tells the story of three Inuit boys who ran away from a residential school in 1972. Only one of the boys survived the 150 km trek back to his hometown after weeks travelling through the wilderness. This harrowing journey came back to light 50 years later when a highway to the Arctic Ocean was being built, following the same route the boy who survived took.
"The Highway is rendered with the delicate light and shadow only achieved through sustained, up-close reporting," said the anonymous judges of the prize in a press statement.
"Roberts' telling of this heart-stopping story brings into full and shocking relief the Canadian government's kidnapping of Indigenous children and their forced enrollment in residential schools, as well as the lasting mark these practices have left on Indigenous culture. This is a rare mix of propulsive narrative and searching reflection on cultural and national identity."
Roberts' work has been published in Granta, The Walrus, Maisonneuve and The Globe and Mail. He has been nominated for an Emmy Award for his documentary work and a National Magazine Award in Canada.
The complete list of grant recipients is as follows:
- Leah Broad for This Woman's War: Women and Music in World War II
- James Duesterberg for Final Fantasy: A Secret History of the Present
- Arun Kundani for I Rise in Fire: H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, and the Long Revolution
- Sarah Esther Maslin for Nothing Stays Buried: Trauma, Truth, and One Town's Fight for Justice in the Aftermath of a Massacre
- Hettie O'Brien for Diminishing Returns
- Emily Ogden for Frailties: How Poe Helps Us Live with Ourselves
- Nadim Roberts for The Highway
- Heather Ann Thompson for Fear and Fury: Bernhard Goetz and the Rebirth of White Vigilantism in America
- Ronald Williams II for Black Embassy: TransAfrica and the Struggle for Foreign Policy Justice
- Hannah Zeavin for All Freud's Children: A Story of Inheritance
Past winners of the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant include American author Sarah M. Broom, Canadian-born author Atossa Araxia Abrahamian and Korean American writer Ilyon Woo.
