Historian and author Renee Fossett has been named the winner of the 2024 William Mills Prize for Non-Fiction Polar Books.

Fossett won the award for The Life and Times of Augustine Tataneuck: An Inuk Hero in Rupert’s Land, 1800–1834 (University of Regina Press, 2023). Tataneuck was an Inuk interpreter and hunter employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company who accompanied explorer English John Franklin’s two overland Arctic expeditions.

The prize, which is awarded every two years by the Polar Libraries Colloquy, honours the best Arctic and Antarctic nonfiction books. This year, 33 books were nominated for the prize.

Two other books received honourable mentions: Peter R. Dawes’s Expedition Relics from High Arctic Greenland: Eight Decades of Exploration History Told Through 102 Objects (Museum Tuschulanum Press) and Colin Monteath’s Erebus The Ice Dragon: A Portrait of an Antarctic Volcano (Massey University Press).

The prize, named for polar librarian and author William Mills, was first awarded in 2006.