The best Canadian nonfiction of 2024

Here are the CBC Books picks for the top Canadian nonfiction of the year!

Annie Carpenter’s life was upended by colonialism, the Indian Act and the residential school system. For 80 years, her family tried to find out what happened to her. Now, journalist and filmmaker Tanya Talaga is telling her great-great grandmother’s story in her new book and documentary series, The Knowing.

Talaga is also the author of Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City, which won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. Her book, All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, was the basis for the 2018 CBC Massey Lectures.

Black Boys Like Me is Matthew R. Morris’ debut collection of eight essays that examines his experiences with race and identity throughout his childhood into his current work as an educator.

The child of a Black immigrant father and a white mother, Morris was influenced by the prominent Black male figures he saw in sports, TV shows and music as he was growing up in Scarborough, Ont. While striving for academic success, he confronted Black stereotypes and explored hip hop culture in the 1990s.

Morris is a writer, advocate and educator based in Toronto. As a public speaker, he has travelled across North America to educate on anti-racism in the education system. Morris was recently announced as one of the readers for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize.

No Credit River is a memoir following Zoe Whittall through six years of her life which include the loss of a pregnancy, a global pandemic and abandoned love. Honest, emotional and painful, the memoir examines anxiety and creativity in the modern world. 

Whittall is an author, poet and screenwriter. Her past works include short story collection Wild Failure, the novels The Fake, The Best Kind of People and Bottle Rocket Hearts. She has also written poetry collections including The Emily Valentine Poems and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life. She has received the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award, a Lambda Literary Award and been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She currently lives in Ontario. 

Poet and Giller-Prize winning author Ian Williams is this year’s Massey lecturer. In What I Mean to Say, the Canadian writer and professor has chosen to focus on the topic of conversations — more specifically, our inability to have them in an age of increasing polarization, cancel culture and emerging forms of online communication. 

Williams is the author of seven books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His novel, Reproduction, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He is a professor of English at the University of Toronto, director of the Creative Writing program, and academic advisor for the Massey College William Southam Journalism Fellowship. 

Everything and Nothing At All is an essay collection that discusses Jenny Heijun Wills’ quest for belonging as a transnational and transracial adoptee, a pansexual and polyamorous person and a parent with a life-long eating disorder. Drawing on her life experiences, she creates a vision of family — chosen, adopted and biological all at once. 

Everything and Nothing At All was shortlisted for the 2024 Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction.

Wills is a writer born in Seoul and raised in Southern Ontario. Her memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related won the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book. She currently lives in Winnipeg and teaches English at the University of Winnipeg.

In Revenge of the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell revisits the lessons of his groundbreaking book The Tipping Point and reframes the subject of social epidemics in the current context. Using stories and research, Gladwell highlights a concerning form of social engineering and offers a guide to making sense of modern contagion. 

Gladwell has written many nonfiction books including The Tipping Point, Blink, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers and The Bomber Mafia. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, a company that produces the podcast Revisionist History among others as well as audiobooks. Gladwell grew up in Elmira, Ont. and now lives in the U.S.

Murray Sinclair made his mark on Canadian society as a judge, activist, senator, the chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry — and he wrote all about it in his memoir Who We Are. The book answers the four guiding questions of Sinclair’s life — Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Who am I? — through stories about his remarkable career and trailblazing advocacy for Indigenous peoples’ rights and freedoms. 

Murray Sinclair was a former judge and senator. He died in November, at age 73. Anishinaabe and a member of the Peguis First Nation, Sinclair was the first Indigenous judge appointed in Manitoba and the second appointed in Canada. He served as Co-Chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in Manitoba and as Chief Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He has won awards including the National Aboriginal Achievement Award, the Manitoba Bar Association’s Equality Award and its Distinguished Service Award (2016) and has received Honorary Doctorates from 14 Canadian universities. 

Sara Sinclair is an oral historian of Cree-Ojibwa and mixed settler descent. She teaches at Columbia University and is currently co-editing two anthologies of Indigenous letters. 

Niigaan Sinclair is a writer, editor, activist and the head of the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the co-editor of Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water and Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories. He won the Peace Educator of the Year award in 2019. He is also the author of the book Wînipêk.

At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage, traces what former CBC Host Carol Off calls the manipulation and weaponization of language through the lens of six words: freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice and taxes.

Carol Off spent almost sixteen years co-hosting the award-winning CBC radio program, As It Happens. Before that, she covered news and current affairs in Canada and around the world. 

Salvage blends autobiography and literary criticism to delve into Dionne Brand’s experiences with colonial tropes in British and American literature and reassesses them in an anti-colonial light. Exploring narratives like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Austen’s Mansfield Park, she searches for what remains in the wreckage of an empire.

Brand is a novelist, poet and filmmaker who has been creating in various mediums for over 40 years. She is a member of the Order of Canada and has won numerous awards, including the 1997 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry for the collection Land to Light On and the 2006 Toronto Book Award for the novel What We All Long For. Brand also won the 2019 Blue Metropolis Violet Literary Prize presented to an 2SLGBTQ+ writer for their body of work.

Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores how music calms the mind in I Heard There Was A Secret Chord. It discusses how human evolution is shaped by music, how music can be used as treatment for various ailments and how it is essential to our social behaviour as humans. 

Levitin is a neuroscientist and writer known for his books This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, Successful Aging and A Field Guide to Lies. He is a professor at McGill University and the founding dean of Minerva University. He is a musician and composer who has been awarded seventeen gold and platinum records. He lives in California and Montreal. 

Reconciling History is a nonfiction work that examines the history of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. It operates on the premise that Canadian history as it has traditionally been told has not been a common or shared enterprise. The book highlights the legacy of Wilson-Raybould’s people, the Musgamagw Tsawataineuk and the far-reaching legacy of colonization over the centuries. 

Jody Wilson-Raybould was a Member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence until her resignation in 2019. Wilson-Raybould is a lawyer and has served as the B.C. regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations. She is a descendant of the Musgamagw Tsawataineuk and Laich-Kwil-Tach peoples, which are part of the Kwakwaka’wakw, also known as the Kwak’wala-speaking peoples. Her other books include Indian in the Cabinet and From Where I Stand.

Roshan Danesh is a Canadian lawyer and educator who for over two decades has been on the frontlines of advancing Indigenous rights and reconciliation in Canada. Danesh’s reconciliation work has included representing Indigenous Nations and advising the Government of British Columbia on the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

In The Monster and the Mirror, K.J. Aiello tells the story of their life through the magical tales that helped them during their struggle with mental illness. Blending memoir, research and cultural criticism, the book dives into stories like The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones to look into our perceptions and stereotypes when it comes to mental health. 

Aiello is a Toronto-based writer whose work has been published in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Chatelaine, The Walrus and This Magazine.

Our Green Heart is a deep dive into the science of forests and how protecting them will in turn protect us from the harsh effects of climate change. Diana Beresford-Kroeger writes powerful essays about the natural world drawing on her experiences as a botanist, biochemist, biologist, poet and the last child in Ireland to get a full Druidic education.

Beresford-Kroeger is a scientist of medical biochemistry, botany and medicine and a recipient of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society Kamookak Medal. She has written numerous books about nature including Arboretum America: A Philosophy of the Forest, which won the Arbor Day Foundation Award, To Speak for the Trees, which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award and The Global Forest, which she wrote and presented in a feature documentary called Call of the Forest. She lives in Ontario. 

Crooked Teeth is Danny Ramadan’s memoir that refutes the oversimplified refugee narrative and transports readers on an epic and often fraught journey from Damascus to Cairo, Beirut and Vancouver. Told with nuance and fearless intimacy about being a queer Syrian-Canadian, Crooked Teeth revisits parts of Ramadan’s past he’d rather forget. 

Ramadan is a Vancouver-based Syrian-Canadian author and advocate. His debut novel The Clothesline Swing was longlisted for Canada Reads in 2018 and his second novel The Foghorn Echoes won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

The Walls Have Eyes is a nonfiction book that uses research to explore what it sees as a worldwide trend: as more people are displaced by war, economic instability, and a warming planet, more countries are turning to AI-driven technology to “manage” the influx. Based on years of researching borderlands across the world, lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar examines how technology is being deployed by governments on the world’s most vulnerable with little regulation. 

The Walls Have Eyes was a finalist for the 2024 nonfiction Governor General’s Award.

Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist who co-runs the Refugee Law Lab at York University and is a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Her work has appeared in New York Times, Al Jazeera, Wired and The Guardian. She lives between Toronto, New York and Athens. 

Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging is a collection of 14 essays that use the global world of flora to examine how the lives of plants and human beings intersect and connect with each other. Blending memoir, scientific research and history, Jessica J. Lee interrogates displacement, identity and belonging to explore the movement and evolution of individuals and plant species across borders.

Lee is a British Canadian Taiwanese author and environmental historian. She won the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the 2021 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature and the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest, which was championed by musician Scott Helman on Canada Reads in 2021.

Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre is the story of Winnipeg, told in a series of essays through the lens of Indigenous resilience and reconciliation.

From the Indian Act and atrocities of colonialism to the creativity and ferocity of the Indigenous peoples preserving their heritage, Sinclair illustrates the way a place — how we love, lose, and fight for it — can help pave the way for the future of an entire country.

Niigaan Sinclair is an Anishinaabe (St. Peter’s/Little Peguis) thinker and assistant professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. He has written for The Exile Edition of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama, The Guardian and CBC Books and is a regular contributor on APTN, CTV and CBC News. Sinclair is also the editor of The Debwe Series and the author and co-editor of award-winning Manitowapow and Centering Anishinaabeg Studies. 

There Is No Blue is a memoir featuring three essays about significant losses Martha Baillie experienced. It’s a response to the death of her mother, father and sister along as ruminations on what made them so alive. 

There Is No Blue won the 2024 Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction.

Baillie is a Toronto-based author. Her novel The Incident Report was on the 2009 Giller Prize longlist and was adapted into a feature film called Darkest Miriam. Her other books include Sister Language and The Search for Heinrich Schlögel.

When writer and filmmaker Chase Joynt discovers his connection to media figure Marshall McLuhan by way of old family documents, he finds himself exploring a difficult past and contextualizing those experiences with other sources, media and stories. Vantage Points shows how masculinity and media impacts the stories we tell and reveals surprising connections. 

Vantage Points was shortlisted for the 2024 Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction.

Joynt is a Canadian director and writer. His most recent film, Framing Agnes, won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. His book You Only Live Twice, co-written with Mike Hoolboom was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. 

Here After tells the powerful love story between Amy Lin and her husband Kurtis and how she copes with his sudden death. Lin shares how this loss upended her ideas of grief, strength and memory. 

Here After was shortlisted for the 2024 Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction.

Lin is a Calgary-based writer whose work has been published in Ploughshares. She has also received residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. Here After is her first book. 

In Invisible Prisons, told through the prose of author Lisa Moore, Jack Whalen shares the violence and abuse he experienced as a child at a St. John’s boarding school for four years. Despite the pain he endured, he found love and satisfaction as a husband and father. After hearing about what happened to him, his daughter promised to become a lawyer to help him seek justice — and that’s just what she did. Now, Whalen’s case is part of a lawsuit that is before the courts. 

Invisible Prisons was shortlisted for the 2024 Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction

Moore is a Newfoundland-based writer. Her books include February, which won Canada Reads 2013 when it was defended by Trent McClellan; Caught, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2013 and was made into a miniseries for CBC television; the YA novel Flannery and the short story collection Something for Everyone, which was on the longlist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

When the Pine Needles Fall tells the story of Canada’s violent siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke in 1990 from the perspective of Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel who was the Kanien’kehá:ka spokesperson during that time. The book covers her experiences leading up to the siege and her work as an activist for her community since. 

Gabriel is a Kanien’kehá:ka, Wakeniáhton, artist, documentarian and Indigenous human rights and environmental rights activist. She lives in Kanehsatà:ke Kanien’kehá:ka Homelands.

Sean Carleton is a historian and professor in Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba. He is also the author of Lessons in Legitimacy.

Journalist Justin Giovannetti Lamothe writes about the odd, winding origins of the closest thing Canada has to a national dish — Poutine. Through his research, he learns more about Canadian history and draws closer to the Québécois heritage he used to drift away from. 

Giovannetti Lamothe is a Montreal-based journalist who has covered major events such as the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion and the Fort McMurray wildfires. He was born in rural Quebec and has lived in Ontario, Alberta and B.C.

Finding Otipemisiwak is the story of Sixties Scoop survivor Andrea Currie and her journey to finding her Métis roots and reuniting with her birth family. It’s a tale of survival, identity, family and culture in the face of colonial practices and Indigenous erasure. 

Currie is a writer, healer and activist. She lives in Cape Breton where she works as a psychotherapist in Indigenous mental health.

In Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes, Adrienne Gruber explores the theme of motherhood through a collection of essays. It celebrates bodies, maternal bonds, beauty — but also the uglier side of parenthood, the chaos and even how close we are to death at any given moment.

Gruber is a poet and essayist originally from Saskatoon. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Q & A, and five chapbooks. She placed third in Event’s creative nonfiction contest in 2020 and was the runner up in SubTerrain’s creative nonfiction contest in 2023.

Gruber was longlisted for the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize for Clocks. In 2020, she made the CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Our Feedback Loop, Our Fractal, Our Never-Ending Pattern. Gruber was also on the longlist for the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize for Better Birthing Through Chemistry.