Canadian journalist Nadim Roberts, one of 10 recipients of the 2024 Whiting Creative Non-Fiction Grant.Supplied
A Canadian journalist is one of the 10 international recipients of the 2024 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, worth $40,000 each to help the writers complete their books in progress.
The forthcoming book by Vancouver’s Nadim Roberts, who is currently based in London, is tentatively titled The Highway. It is a story that begins with three Inuit boys who in 1972 ran away from a residential school (the since-closed and demolished Sir Alexander Mackenzie School in Inuvik, NWT).
The Highway is set to be published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Spiegel & Grau in the United States. Roberts is the first Canadian with a Canadian originating publisher to receive the grant, which was established in 2016 and is funded by the New York-based Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.
Commenting on the unfinished book, the Whiting judges said The Highway was a “rare mix of propulsive narrative and searching reflection on cultural and national identity.”
The program was initially founded in 2016 to assist American authors, but eligibility was expanded in 2022 to include writers from Canada and Britain as well. That year, two Canadians received grants: New York-based journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (for 2024’s The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World) and Vanity Fair writer May Jeong (for the forthcoming The Life: Sex, Work, and Love in America).
According to the Whiting Foundation, there were several reasons for broadening the pool of eligible writers, including a simple fandom for Canada.
“We admire the liveliness of the country’s deep literary tradition,” said Courtney Hodell, the foundation’s director of literary programs said in 2023. “American and Canadian culture and concerns are in conversation with one another, and the ways Canadian writers see and interpret the world refresh and expand our viewpoint beyond the parochial.”
The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant assists multiyear book projects requiring large amounts of thinking, research and writing, after significant work has been accomplished but when an extra infusion can support the ultimate shape and quality of the book.
Roberts first started reporting on the subject of his book seven years ago. His story about residential schools, the legacy of Arctic colonization, and the three runaway boys and their families was published in Granta magazine in 2017.
Among previous grant recipients are Rachel Aviv (author Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us), Sarah M. Broom (The Yellow House), Andrea Elliott (Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City), Patricia Evangelista (Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country), Ben Goldfarb (Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet), Chloé Cooper Jones (Easy Beauty), Meghan O’Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness) and George Packer (Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century).
This year’s 10 grantees were chosen from 15 finalists by a panel of four judges. The foundation welcomed submissions for works of history, cultural and political reportage, biography, memoir, science, philosophy, criticism and personal essays.