Aaron Williams has been named the winner of the 2025 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction.

Williams won the $10,000 prize for his second book of nonfiction, The Last Logging Show: A Forestry Family at the End of an Era, published by Harbour Publishing.

The annual prize, established and endowed by the late writer and journalist Edna Staebler, is administered by Wilfred Laurier University and recognizes Canadian writers for a first or second work of creative nonfiction with a Canadian locale or significance.

Williams, who is based in Halifax, is a third-generation B.C. logger who chronicles his return to Haida Gwaii and the changes in the archipelago where the logging industry is increasingly unwelcome in The Last Logging Show.  Williams’s first book, Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, was based on his experience fighting forest fires across Canada.

“In Edna’s own creative non-fiction, she often wrote compassionately about communities that were marginal and poorly understood, from Nova Scotia fishing villages to Mennonite farming settlements,” award juror Harry Froklage, former associate director of development for Laurier’s Faculty of Arts, said in a press release. “Aaron Williams has written a book about such a community. The Last Logging Show is a compelling chronicle of the lives of loggers and their families as their rugged way of life is endangered by global economics, environmental activism and the assertion of sovereignty over their own resources by Haida Gwaii’s Indigenous people. As a logger’s son who has abandoned the logger’s life, Williams presents a nuanced, often very funny, examination of a divisive topic through the voices of those who have lived their lives in the diminishing shadow of old growth forests.”

Martin Bauman, also a Halifax-based journalist, was the other finalist for this year’s award for his book Hell of a Ride: Chasing Home and Survival on a Bicycle Voyage Across Canada (Pottersfield Press).

An award ceremony for Williams will be held on April 1, 2026, at Laurier’s Waterloo campus.