2026 call for submissions
Submissions to the 2026 QWF Awards are now open. The deadline to complete your submission form and pay the submission fees is June 3, 2026, 5:00 p.m. ET for the book prizes and July 8, 2026, 5:00 p.m. for the Spoken Word Prize.
Read call for submissions2025
Sponsored by the Lilly and Joshua Ronn FoundationWinner
shortlisted
Hope Is a Woman’s Name: My Journey as a Bedouin Palestinian Activist in Israel
(Sutherland House Books)
The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain
(Random House Canada)
Jury
Fitsum Areguy
Toula Drimonis
Claire Mulligan
2024
Sponsored by the Lilly and Joshua Ronn FoundationWinner
Furniture Music
(Wave Books)
shortlisted
Ghost Stories: On Writing Biography
(McGill-Queen's University Press)
Picturing the Game: An Illustrated Story of Hockey
(McGill-Queen's University Press)
Jury
Michelle Coupal
Alex Manley
Julie Sedivy
2023
Winner
Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation
(HarperCollins Publishers)
shortlisted
The New Masculinity: A Roadmap for a 21st-Century Definition of Manhood
(ECW Press)
The North Star: Canada and the Civil War Plots Against Lincoln
(Knopf Canada)
The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging
(Simon & Schuster Canada)
Jury
Paul Seesequasis
Kelly S. Thompson
Merrily Weisbord
2022
Winner
Looking for Alicia: The Unfinished Life of an Argentinian Rebel
(House of Anansi Press)
shortlisted
Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic
(Fernwood Publishing)
The Rebel Scribe: Carleton Beals and the Progressive Challenge to U.S. Policy in Latin America
(Hamilton Books, Rowman & Littlefield))
Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf
(Coach House Books)
Jury
Victor Swoboda
Stephen Trumper
Evelyn C. White
2021
Winner
Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism Against Indigenous Children in Canada
(McGill-Queen’s University Press)
shortlisted
Peacekeeper’s Daughter: A Middle-East Memoir
(Thistledown Press)
Bent Out of Shape
(Between the Lines)
Neglected No More: The Urgent Need to Improve the Lives of Canada’s Elders in the Wake of a Pandemic
(Random House Canada)
Music, Late and Soon
(Biblioasis)
Jury
William Dere
Ruth DyckFehderau
John Goddard
2020
Winner
shortlisted
The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy
(Princeton University Press)
The Audacity of His Enterprise: Louis Riel and the Métis Nation That Canada Never Was, 1840-1875
(McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Jury
Jeffrey Bachman
Sonja Boon
Kate Sterns
2019
Winner
The Ghost Garden
(Random House Canada)
Jury
Mark Medley
Scott Moodie
Erin Wunker
2018
Winner
In Praise of Blood
(Random House Canada)
shortlisted
Policing Black Lives: State Violence In Canada from Slavery to the Present
(Fernwood Publishing)
Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by ‘Toots’
(New Star Books)
Jury
Nigel Hunt
Marcello Di Cintio
Anne Lagacé Dowson
2017
Winner
shortlisted
Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867 – 1917
(McGill-Queen's University Press)
The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence, 1914 – 1948
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Jury
Chris Frey
Rod MacLeod
Rebecca Margolis
2016
Winner
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
(Allen Lane Canada, Penguin Random House Canada)
shortlisted
Shanghai Grand
(HarperCollins Publishers Ltd)
Indigenous Writes
(HighWater Press (an imprint of Portage & Main Press))
Jury
Andrea Bennett
Peter Knegt
Taylor Lambert