MQUP Award Winners and Finalists

We are proud that many McGill-Queen’s University Press titles have won awards this year, including the Canada Prize and Donner Prize! Here is a roundup of recently winning and shortlisted titles.

Winner of the 2025 ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize

What the World Might Look Like
Decolonial Stories of Resistance and Refusal

By Susie O’Brien

What the World Might Look Like examines the way resilience thinking has come to dominate the settler-colonial imagination and explores alternative approaches to resilience writing that instead offer decolonial models of thought.

Winner of the 2025 BSC Marie Tremaine Medal

Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America
Writings and Art, Life and Times

By I.S. MacLaren

Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America blends the methodologies of art history, ethnohistory, fur-trade history, and history of the book to investigate the depiction and description of Indigenous people in North America by the foremost artist-traveller of the nineteenth century.

Winner of the 2025 Canada Prize

Population Control
Theorizing Institutional Violence

Edited by Jen Rinaldi and Kate Rossiter

Violence is an inescapable through-line across the experiences of institutional residents. While Canada closes many of its large-scale facilities, institutional violence continues to spill over into community settings. Population Control explores the relational conditions that give rise to this violence across all spaces of care.

Winner of the 2025 CHA Clio Book Prize (Atlantic) 

Finalist for the 2025 CHA Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History

Lost in the Crowd
Acadian Soldiers of Canada’s First World War

By Gregory M.W. Kennedy

Gregory Kennedy focuses on the experiences of Acadian soldiers and their families before, during, and after the First World War. He significantly shifts common interpretations about recruitment in French Canada, service overseas, and the factors determining post-war socioeconomic outcomes.

Winner of the 2025 CHA Clio Book Prize (Quebec)

Sanctuary in Pieces
Two Centuries of Flight, Fugitivity, and Resistance in a North American City

By Laura Madokoro

Drawing on archival research and interviews in Montreal/Mooniyaang/Tiohtià:ke, Laura Madokoro explores the history of protection and hospitality over two centuries and the shifting political terrain upon which sanctuary has been sought and, on occasion, received.

Winner of the 2025 Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize

The Politics of Refugee Policy in the Global South

By Ola G. El-Taliawi

While scholarship on refugee migration tends to center on the Global North, most refugees actually reside in the Global South. This book shifts the focus, revealing how governments in the Global South make refugee policy, including a decade-long account of how two small states responded to the Syrian refugee crisis.

Winner of the 2025 CPSA Donald Smiley Prize 

The Great Right North
Inside Far-Right Activism in Canada

By Stéphane Leman-Langlois, Aurélie Campana, and Samuel Tanner

Most politicians have been quiet about the phenomenon of far-right extremism in Canada, insisting it is imported activism financed elsewhere. The Great Right North provides an essential primer for understanding its vast and urgent homegrown challenges.

Winner of the 2025 Donner Prize

Seized by Uncertainty
The Markets, Media, and Special Interests That Shaped Canada’s Response to COVID-19

By Kevin Quigley, Kaitlynne Lowe, Sarah Moore, and Brianna Wolfe

Seized by Uncertainty explores Canada’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the various contexts – psychological, social, legal, administrative, and economic – in which it emerged, exposing how it revealed governance problems that long predated the threat.

Finalist for the 2025 ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize

Restless in Sleep Country
Imagination and the Cultural Politics of Sleep

By Paul Huebener

Cultural visions of sleep circulate through such diverse forms as mattress ads, billboards, comic books, memoirs, experimental poetry, and bedtime story phone apps. Guiding us through the imaginative landscape of slumber, Restless in Sleep Country illuminates the figure of sleep as a site of inequity, struggle, and gratification.

Finalist for the 2025 CHA Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History

Finding Molly Johnson
Irish Famine Orphans in Canada

By Mark G. McGowan

In Finding Molly Johnson Mark McGowan traces what happened to the many orphaned children who fled Ireland’s Great Famine and made the long voyage to Canada. The book reveals that the story of Canada’s acceptance of the famine orphans is a product of national myth-making.

Finalist for the 2025 CHA Wallace K. Ferguson Prize

Early Modern Naval Health Care in England

By Matthew Neufeld

Early Modern Naval Health Care in England follows the transformation of organized health care for Royal Navy seamen from 1650 to 1750. Matthew Neufeld finds that these changes relied on the relationship between naval officials and the ordinary people of coastal areas, especially the women who typically oversaw care spaces and engaged in care work.

Finalist for the 2025 CPSA Donald Smiley Prize

What Women Represent
The Impact of Women in Parliament

By Erica Rayment

Political equity advocates and academics often argue that we must elect more women, but what difference does it make if we do? What Women Represent shows that women can and do influence the issues raised and the decisions made in parliamentary debate and decision-making.

Shortlisted for the 2025 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing

The Adaptable Country
How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century

By Alasdair Roberts

The Adaptable Country reminds us about the bigger picture: in a turbulent world, authoritarian rule is a tempting path to security. Canada’s challenge is to show how political systems built to respect diversity and human rights can also respond nimbly to existential threats.