Stephen R. Bown, the Ottawa-born‚ B.C.-based author, has received this year’s William Mills Prize for Non-Fiction Polar Books – a biennial international honour administered by the Polar Libraries Colloquy – for his 2015 biography, White Eskimo: Knud Rasmussen’s Fearless Journey into the Heart of the Arctic (Douglas & McIntyre).
The title is the first full-length biography of Knud Rasmussen‚ an early-20th-century arctic explorer and adventurer from Greenland who went on to complete a three-year dogsled mission to Alaska.
The win was announced at a ceremony during a Colloquy conference in Fairbanks‚ Alaska, on July 13.