2023 Donald Smiley Prize

Winner: Debra Thompson

Debra Thompson: The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

Excerpt from jury report: The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging is a highly engaging and intellectually courageous book that investigates the politics of race in Canada and the US. It is masterfully written in the spirit of a dialogue with the reader, offering a window into the author’s lived experience. The auto-ethnographic approach in the book is both methodologically innovative and powerfully employed to analyze the historical development and critical junctures in the politics of race relations in Canada and the US. This book is so much more than a biography: it offers a penetrating analysis of the dynamics of race and belonging in Canada to explore how race intersects with politics and daily life. As such, this book makes a timely – and what is sure to be enduring – contribution to critical and enduring ideas about Canadian culture and politics.