Brett Popplewell has won the 2024 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction for his book Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain, and the Search for a Hidden Past (Collins/HarperCollins).

Popplewell was named the winner of the $10,000 prize on Nov. 4.

Outsider tells the life story of one of the world’s oldest living ultramarathon runners, the now octogenarian Dag Aabye, who lived in a rusted school bus deep in the forest near Vernon, B.C., and would run three hours every day day through the mountainous terrain of the Okanagan.

Established and endowed by the late writer and award-winning journalist Edna Staebler in 1991, the annual prize recognizes Canadian writers for a first or second work of creative nonfiction that includes a Canadian locale or significance.

The other finalists for the prize were Karen Pinchin for Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas and Josie Teed for British Columbiana: A Millennial in a Gold Rush Town.

An award ceremony will be held at Laurier’s Waterloo campus in the spring.