Nadim Roberts (Mark Cocksedge)

Canadian London-based journalist Nadim Roberts is one of 10 writers to receive a 2024 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant.

The program, now in its ninth year, awards $40,000 (U.S.) grants to support writers working on multi-year, book-length nonfiction projects. The grants are administered by the Whiting Foundation, an American organization that supports writers and scholars.

In 2022, the foundation expanded its criteria to include Canadian and U.K. writers. The grant supports writers at the mid-point of multi-year, book-length projects. Previous recipients include Rachel Aviv, Andrea Elliott, and Sarah M. Broom.

Roberts was named one of this year’s grantees for The Highway, a book to be published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart in Canada (and Spiegel & Grau in the U.S.) that tells the story of three Inuit boys who ran away from a residential school in the Canadian Arctic in 1972 and disappeared into the tundra. One of the boys reappeared in his hometown weeks later, worse for wear after a 150-kilometre journey, and their story came to the fore 50 years later as a highway to the Arctic Ocean that followed the boys’ route neared completion. Roberts tells the story of the three boys and their families, and explores the legacy of Arctic colonization and how that road continues to affect communities in the North. Roberts’s work has been published in Granta, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, and The Globe and Mail.

In their citation, the judges called Roberts’s work “a rare mix of propulsive narrative and searching reflection on cultural and national identity.” 

Earlier this year, Roberts was named one of 15 fellows for 2025 of think-tank New America, a program that grants recipients a one-year term and “an intellectual home where they have the time, space, and resources to pursue their projects.”

The other recipients of this year’s Whiting Grants for Creative Nonfiction are Leah Broad, James Duesterberg, Arun Kundani, Sarah Esther Maslin, Hettie O’Brien, Emily Ogden, Heather Ann Thompson, Ronald Williams II, and Hannah Zeavin.