Arctic history buffs around the world are today celebrating what would have been John Rae’s 208th birthday. Born at the Hall of Clestrain in Orkney on September 30, 1813, Rae became a doctor in Edinburgh and then entered the fur trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company. After learning from First Nations and Inuit hunters, he became the foremost overland traveler of the age. Rae discovered both the fate of the 1845 Franklin expedition and the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage. In England during the Victorian era, when Charles Dickens and others thought fit to slander the Inuit, Rae emerged as the greatest champion of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. In 1999, I was with the late Louie Kamookak when he led the way to the cairn that Rae built in 1854 overlooking Rae Strait.In Orkney, the John Rae Society is working hard to restore the Hall of Clestrain and turn it into an International Arctic Visitor Centre. Happy birthday, John Rae! And Louie, wish you were here!

Canada’s non-fiction crisis is the focus of this week’s SHuSH by Kenneth Whyte. That crisis is the absence of support in this country for research-based non-fiction – biography, history, and science. Whyte, publisher of Sutherland House, is spurred to comment by the recently announced five-book shortlist for the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust prize for non-fiction. He laments -- rightly in my view -- that all five books are memoirs. Dan Wells, publisher and owner of Biblioasis, writes in support of Whyte. Wells notes that writer Elaine Dewar worked solidly for more than a year to produce On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years – and he could afford to pay her only a modest four-figure advance. Few Canadian authors can afford to self-finance a research-heavy book. So countless books don’t get written. Canadians get swamped with biographies and histories from, ahem, other countries. “We’ve got to figure out a way to fund this kind of writing,” Wells writes, “whether it’s through private funders or through public funders.” Funnily enough, or maybe not so funnily, the Writers’ Trust of Canada was once on track to solve this problem. I know because in 2001, my book Fatal Passage won the Writers’ Trust Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize. That award was discontinued after 2006 in favor of what is now the Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction. That was the fatal wrong turn. True, the Drainie-Taylor was awarded for works of biography, autobiography, or memoir. And, also true, in any given bookstore, you will find biography situated with autobiography. Still, the Drainie-Taylor pointed the way forward, and that is to split Nonfiction into the two streams Whyte and Wells have identified. An excellent place to begin would be to offer two different awards in nonfiction: one for Memoir and Autobiography, the other for Biography, History, and Science (research-heavy works). How hard can that be?

Be there or be square: https://canadianauthors.org/national/canwrite-2021-conference/