This site was created by the staff at the C.B. "Bud" Johnston Library in November 2008. The major purpose is to offer an omnibus website that aggregates information about many of the Canadian book awards that are presented each year. A secondary purpose was to provide for the members of the scholarly community at the University of Western Ontario a convenient way to locate prize winning books in the collections of the Western Libraries.
The original intention was to focus only on the National Business Book Award so that students and faculty at the RIchard Ivey School of Business could find past winners of that award and quickly locate the books in the library. For this reason you will find that the list of business book winners also includes considerable additional information. The decision then was made to expand the site to include other non-fiction award winners. After realizing that there was no convenient way to locate all of the Canadian book awards, we thought we should add those that related to fiction. The person who was most affected by these expansive decisions and is most responsible for harvesting all of the data is Alie Visser who deserves considerable credit. Some caveats:
- The list is not exhaustive. There are many book awards presented in Canada. Apart from provincial, regional and even metropolitan awards, there are many different categories including the Canadian Culinary Book Awards which you will find listed at the University of Guelph.
- The list may be out-of-date. We do add winners and finalists annually. It is still the case that having all of this historical data will be useful.
- The website for each award should be your primary resource. Any information provided by us should be checked at the original award site.
We hope the lists are useful and that you enjoy your Canadian reading experience.To shop for these books see our related site Books on the Web.